Dean's Student Advisory Group
Career Night Participant Biography
Karl Matthias
(B.A. 1998, Medieval & Renaissance Studies)
Senior Security Engineer
Nationwide Insurance
3 Nationwide Plaza, 3-16-24
Columbus, OH 43215
(614) 249-9319
matthik@nationwide.com
First job out of college: Internet Team, Nationwide Insurance
Though a long-time fan of the humanities, Mr. Matthias also made a hobby of computers from the time he was 7 years old. Beginning as a junior at O S U, he worked as an intern at Nationwide doing U N I X System Administration and later Network Security for Nationwide Life Insurance Company and Nationwide Enterprise respectively. When he graduated in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 1998, he was able to accept a full-time position at Nationwide working with the Internet Team, the group responsible for all connectivity between Nationwide and the Internet. This eight-person group was responsible for designing, implementing, and managing the computer infrastructure to support 16,000 Internet users at Nationwide and its affiliates. Mr. Matthias was responsible for the implementation of time synchronization for all the servers in the company based on a clock source pulled from the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition, he helped design an Intrusion Detection strategy for Nationwide and worked on the Business Firewall project, which is a meeting point between the networks of Nationwide and its business partners. As a member of the International "virtual team" for Nationwide Global Holdings, Mr. Matthias designed the secure network by which Nationwide would attach itself to its newly purchased international subsidiaries in Luxembourg, Poland, and Hong Kong. He also assisted in the selection of international vendors, suppliers, and service companies to provide support for Nationwide on an international scale. Mr. Matthias worked at Nationwide from the time of graduation until November of 1999. He then accepted a position at AT&T Solutions, the outsourcing division of AT&T, and was assigned to the Bank One contract. He worked there in the Internet Services group, in a design and implementation role. He co-authored software to monitor and report how well AT&T was meeting its Service Level Agreement (S"L A) to the Bank. He also assisted in a partial redesign of the firewall infrastructure and implementation of a failover environment for the business partner network. In the summer of 2000 Mr. Matthias was offered a position on a new Internet Infrastructure and Network Security Team at Manifest Solutions, a Columbus-based consulting firm with offices in Columbus and Cleveland. The team's first assignment has been at Nationwide, where they are implementing a company-wide, service-independent authentication system, redesigning much of the Internet architecture, and generally updating Nationwide's Internet presence. Mr. Matthias then worked as a Senior Development Engineer for Secure Interiors, a start-up which provided affordable, managed security services for businesses with always-on Internet connections. After that company folded in 2003 he returned, once again, to Nationwide, where he now works for the Security Operations team. In all of this, Mr. Matthias finds that the ability to logically present and support ideas and write clear, understandable reports has been absolutely invaluable. Karl is often called to interface between engineers and management because he is able to interpret the ideas of the engineers and make them presentable in an easily understood, non-technical manner. Thus, even in computers, he finds that he uses his humanities degree every day on the job.
