Ever wonder where some of our alumni are and what they are doing? An even more interesting question is what they think of Mudd now that they have graduated and moved on into the real world. In MO's first ever alumni interview, I interview Greg Rae '00 who is currently working for today's most popular search engine, Google. He actually helped me make my decision to come to HMC about a year and a half ago.

KK: So Greg, can you tell us a little bit about yourself: where you're from, where you live, your education, and what you do for a living?

GR: I was born in Napa, CA, and spent the first 25 years of my life in various parts of California before moving on to New York City. I've been gainfully employed as a software engineer at Google for the last few years.

KK: What was the most memorable experience you had while at Mudd?

GR: Oh, there are so many... But I suppose you want one that's printable...
My most stressful time: Presentation Days, senior year. I had my math clinic presentation, my cs research presentation, and a presentation on my team's paper for the MCM contest. And to top it all off, since my parents were visiting, I had decided I was going to come out to them. That was the start of presentation days for me, so I felt a little bit surprised when I was still totally stressed out, until I realized that I still had all these presentations to give.

KK: What was your major and why? humanities concentration? favorite class and why? favorite Prof and why?

GR: Major: I started out thinking I was going to be a physics major, but ended up as a math/computer science joint major because I discovered that I was actually interested enough in theoretical computer science to take the classes, and never got around to signing up for quantum.
Concentration: science, technology, and society, because I've always been interested in the sociological side of what scientists and inventors do. The ways in which people's attitudes about religion affect their ideas of science and mathematics fascinated me long before I got to Mudd.

Favorite class: probably algorithms. They were my favorites as far as subject matter... I had algorithms from Ran, who's one of the most entertaining professors I ever had a class from.
Favorite prof: it's hard to single out any one of the professors I did research with: Ran, Z, and Ward were all amazing to work with for different reasons. I also try to run into Bernoff, Dodds, and Su every time I visit. I've talked with both Raugh and Benjamin in the last couple of months... It's hard for me to single out any single professor because I had positive experiences with so many of them.

KK: Worst class? why?

GR: Stems. It was bad enough, because the engineering department decided we weren't allowed to work together on our homework. The worst part of my experience there was that my backpack got stolen from outside of Platt two days before the final (regardless of the Honor Code, it's not a good idea to leave anything there overnight...) I hadn't really been reading the textbook, since I was going to rely on my notes for the final. So in spite of the fact that the final was open-book and open-notes, I couldn't actually find anything in the book. I didn't retain much from stems, and the parts I still remember were the parts that were covered in other classes like Complex Analysis and E&M. I don't feel bad saying that the engineering department's experiment was an utter failure and that it was a waste of a class for me. (That said, I think they changed their policy the next year. So I can only hope it's better now.)

KK: Why did you choose to attend Mudd? Where did you live? What was your overall experience like both socially and academically?

GR: I think I answered the first part of this question for you a year and a half ago... I got accepted to MIT, CalTech, and Mudd, and had to decide between them. MIT was eliminated because I decided I couldn't handle snow (I know better now...) That left CalTech and Mudd, so I came down to visit. Mudd's pre-frosh overnight was a lot of fun. The students I stayed with brought me down to the lab they were working on, and showed off their research (and also spent some time playing with liquid nitrogen, which was pretty cool.) Then I went to CalTech's weekend, which lasted four days. After the first four hours, I knew Mudd was the right place for me: CalTech's students seemed really depressed, and less social. The highlight of the weekend for them was the free food, not the Nobel Laureates that were coming to speak. What can I say? I was a bit idealistic then. But what really triggered it for me was when a CalTech grad student told me that I shouldn't go to CalTech because the professors only paid attention to grad students. I think that was some of the best advice that I got.

I was misplaced my freshman year into West (I hope I did a better job the year I placed frosh...) Then I turned out to be a four-year Westie in spite of it all. I had a great experience both socially and academically. I'm still in close contact with many people, in spite of the fact that I have to travel thousands of miles to see most of them. And as far as academics go, it's hard to argue with doing research and getting published by the time I graduated. And where else would I have gotten the chance to learn stage-fighting for a Shakespeare play, or compete on the ballroom dancing team?

KK: So you really don't have any regrets about coming to Mudd?

GR: Was the praise in my previous answer not lavish enough? I don't want to say that Mudd was perfect, but I do think that it was perfect for me.

KK: How did you like the whole 5C environment, if at all you did?

GR: There were some opportunities that the 5C environment gave that I don't think I would have had if Mudd was just a single small school. For example, I don't think we would have been able to field a ballroom dance team, and I played clarinet on the pep band at football games for a couple of years.

KK: What did you like about the city of Claremont? What didn't you like about it?

GR: The only advantage that Claremont has is that it's sort of close to LA, but in many ways that's not really a good thing. The pollution sucks. The fact that the demographics are basically people from the colleges and people who want a nice quiet suburb isn't such a good thing: many of the residents don't seem to like things like loud noise, which seems pretty inevitable to me if you live next to a college. There aren't really too many college hangouts off campus (in spite of the fact that this is negative, it does have the positive effect ofincreasing community at the 5C.)

KK: Do you think Mudd prepared you well for the real world and how? What opportunities did you have at Mudd that you think you wouldn't have had elsewhere?

GR: The opportunity to do research at Mudd might not have happened elsewhere. The close community that Mudd had brought me out of my shell, and convinced me that I could run for ASHMC Council, be involved in JB/DB, be Orientation Director...

As far as preparation for the real world, I'd have to say clinic was a good experience there. I had one of those typical clinic bad experiences where we didn't even get the data we were supposed to analyze until the second semester, and had to redefine the scope of the project. That kind of thing happens way to often in the real world. I'd have to say that I feel that I managed to get through Mudd's CS program without doing any really large projects, which is the only way to get a good feeling for what software engineering is really like. (Part of that is because I did a math clinic instead of a CS clinic.) So while I got what I wanted (a good education in theoretical CS) I don't feel that it's necessarily what you want if you're just in it to get a job. That said, Google likes to hire people who have a good understanding of theory, so it worked out for me anyway.

KK: So you work for Google. What's that like? How is it different from when you first got there?

GR: When I started in September of 2000, there were about 150 employees. We had a single office in Mountain View, California. Over the years, I've seen us get more than ten times bigger. The New York office was as big as the company was when I moved out here last July.

I've heard from many people who come back and visit Mudd that getting a job was a let-down, because the caliber of people they work with doesn't match the kind of person you're working with at Mudd. I feel like I missed out on that experience, which is a good thing: the people at Google are incredible to work with.

KK: What exactly is your job at Google?

GR: I work on log analysis. Essentially what this means is that I write software that generates statistics about what features people are using, what they're searching for, and how they use the site, and get those statistics to other people in the company who can do something useful with them. The most visible aspect of this outside the company is the Google Zeitgeist: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

KK: What do you believe has been your greatest achievement so far?

GR: My achievement that has been best received has probably been the map of the world that shows up at Google, showing where people from around the world are coming from. One of my coworkers extended my flat map version to a spinning globe, with all kinds of interesting animations, color-coding by language, that sort of thing. I had it in my cube while I was in Mountain View, and if you thought that software engineering wasn't a way to meet celebrities, you're wrong... Gwyneth Paltrow, Coldplay, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, along with just about anyone else who dropped by the office stopped by my cube.

But I'm not really happy about my achievements so far... Google has been involved in changing the world for the better, but it's not really my accomplishment. I really want to have something I can call my own. I've been involved with a group of people around the country getting a PAC started to fight for sensible intellectual property law (see http://www.ipaction.org), and I'm also working on getting the next version of a website developed to get people politically involved (see http://www.cosmopolity.org).

KK: What advice would you give to incoming students who are worried about the difficulty of the Mudd curriculum?

GR: Get good study habits early. At least read over the homework before the night before, so your subconscious gets to work on it even if you're not thinking about it too much. And work together... Explain the subject to someone else; if you can't teach it, you don't understand it very well.

KK: Have you been on campus since your graduated?

GR: I've been to a couple of job fairs (I might even get to come out for some on-campus recruiting in November...) I've also come to every alumni weekend since graduating (which is a lot easier when you actually live in California...) One summer I even came back to work on a paper with Professor Ward relating to my clinic project. It took 4 full years before I was done with that clinic project... I think it must hold some sort of record there.

KK: Lastly, would you like to give a shout out to any of the faculty or staff?

GR: I'll try and do that the next time I come to visit...