FAQ#4, Post 2: What are you doing after graduation?

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Hi everyone,

Here’s the second post in the post-graduation outcomes series, in which I interview my friends here and beg them to tell me about all the cool things that they have planned for life after Mudd. In this post, we have

Annie Chung, Management Trainee at McMaster-Carr
Gourav Khadge, Signals Processing Engineer at the Aerospace Corporation
Huy Nguyen, M.A. in Higher Education Administration at University of Michigan
Misha Vysotskiy, PhD in Pharmacogenomics at UC San Francisco
Sophia Williams, Watson Fellowship and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University

Keep reading to find out more about how they decided on their career paths!

Annie with her E80 rocket team Left to Right: Michelle Wei '15, Cleo Stannard '15, Risa Egerter '15, Rachel Roley '15, and Annie Chung '15

Annie with her E80 rocket team
Left to Right: Michelle Wei ’15, Cleo Stannard ’15, Risa Egerter ’15, Rachel Roley ’15, and Annie Chung ’15

Annie Chung, McMaster-Carr
Hometown: San Jose, CA
Hobbies/Interests: Listening to music (Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Hardwell), concerts, watching TV, traveling, eating pho & KBBQ
Major: Engineering

What are your post-graduation plans? I will be at McMaster-Carr, as a Management Trainee under the Management Development Program, which is a two-year rotational program to learn about the individual departments and how they operate, to prepare for management positions after the rotational program.

Why did you choose this job? Looking back at all the engineering group projects, I learned that, although I enjoyed the technical aspects, I really loved dealing with the people around me. Instead of diving straight into the technical work, I had a different mindset – I wanted to map out the processes. I wanted to delegate tasks to the strengths of the team members, and I had an overall vision to ensure project success – all of which are important management traits. As I continued at Mudd, I enjoyed the challenging technical work, but complemented it with business/economics humanities courses. Having both backgrounds gives me a slight advantage, as critical thinking and problem-solving skills are essential in the business world. I chose this job over traditional engineering positions because it’s unique in the sense that I’ll be indirectly using the skills as I learned as an engineer in business applications. I think it’ll be very challenging, but also very rewarding.

Did Mudd help you in finding this job (alum/connections/profs/classes you took): McMaster has developed a good connection with the Claremont Colleges over the past years. This position was posed on Claremont Connect, a 5C-wide career portal. Since this is a management position, it was aimed more towards Claremont McKenna College students, but students from other colleges were also encouraged to apply.

Gourav with friends at South Dorm Left to Right:

Gourav with friends at South Dorm – he’s in the green shirt

Gourav Khadge, Signals Processing Engineer at the Aerospace Corporation
Hometown: Bellport, NY (Lawn Guy Land)
Hobbies/interests: cool engineering things, HvZ, backpacking in the mountains, 3AM philosophy, terrible music, sleep deprivation
Major: Engineering

What inspired you to pursue a career in the aerospace industry and specifically within the signals processing group? tl;dr: I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, but it’s part of the plan so it’s okay.

So it’s been a long road. I actually originally applied to Mudd as a physics major. In high school, I never heard about engineering. However, the E11 Autonomous Vehicles class looked pretty cool, so I enrolled in it my first semester at Mudd. By the end of that semester after some long soul searching, I switched into the major.

After all the time I’ve spent in school, the biggest eye openers for me have been my summer internships in industry. I think the biggest thing I’ve spent my summer internships learning is that I don’t really know what are the real problems out there that people are trying to solve. After 4 years of some of the best education you can get out there, I think I’m even more clueless as to what problems actually matter, and where I fit in.

What is the state of modern engineering? What are the frontiers now? I once thought I just wanted to work advancing the private space industry at a place like SpaceX, but I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what’s easy or hard, valuable or not. The biggest thing I’ve done with my life plan over the last year is incorporate that uncertainty into my life. I’ve now shifted my goals towards getting the most experience as world wisdom as quickly as possible. Here at the end of college, I’m thinking about where I’m going to be in another 4 years. The big thing that I want in the next 4 years is to have a better understanding of the world’s engineering frontiers, and a stronger position to get out onto them.

The Aerospace Corporation was really interesting to me, since they’re a nonprofit company that doesn’t have a product. Instead, they sell technical expertise. They get contracted by a number of clients including various other companies and the DoD to do the work that their clients feel they need outside help with. As an employee, I will have the opportunity to get onto many projects across many industries and see the biggest struggles that the world’s top engineers need help with. Not only that, but I will be hired into the digital signal processing group. Although I am still pretty ignorant of the state of the frontiers of engineering, I understand that the ongoing digital revolution has been changing our technological capability at an impressive rate. If there’s one place to position yourself for the upcoming future, it’s in digital systems.

I don’t know if I want to stay there forever, but I think it has a good chance of putting me somewhere in four years where I can figure out the next stage of my life. And you know, that’s all that matters right now.

How has Mudd helped prepare you for your specific interests? Any classes/projects in particular? Mudd opened up the idea of ever doing engineering to me. A lot of the most important resources Mudd has had for me is people, generally in the form of upperclassmen and professors. I’m not sure if I could’ve made the decision to switch into engineering without the aid of deep discussion with my seniors. Keeping in touch with my graduated friends has helped me navigate the the crazy world of applying to jobs.

When I first got into engineering, I had this idea that personal projects outside of class would make me stand out. Yet, I’ve always found that Mudd’s engineering classes have usually been flexible enough that any project I really want to do can just be incorporated into a class I’m already in. E80, MicroP’s, Big Electronics, all of these big project classes can be a huge timesuck, but their project statements are usually pretty flexible to your interests. I’ve always managed to turn them into something I really enjoyed. I ended up not doing too many personal projects, because I enjoyed myself enough throwing myself into projects that I would already get credit for. In the end, the biggest things that seemed to make the strongest impressions on my interviewers was my excitement in talking about my E59 whale-tracking project, and my E80 rocket localization project. Sometimes, I think I’m crazy for the number of hours I spend on engineering, but I realize that my Mudd career has really blurred the line between my work and my free time that I don’t even really notice.

Classes and projects are great, but you can learn how to do most things anywhere. In the end, my socialization has been so much more valuable to me than any single class that I’ve taken. I used to think technical competence meant everything. Looking back, I have to say that most of my job interviews were won over less about impressing my interviewers with technical know-how, and more about how well I could keep a technical conversation going, and convincing them that I would be a cool person to work with.

Summary:
Upperclassmen are the best.

Classes are flexible. Turn them into something you enjoy.

Interviews are more like dates than Q&A sessions. Mudd is great, not because it helps you sound smart, but because it helps you become a more interesting person that someone might want to see a second time.

Huy at Platt Campus Center, where the Dean of Students Offices are located

Huy during his time as a Summer Institute Mentor

Huy Nguyen, M.A. in Higher Education Administration at University of Michigan
Hometown: Winnetka, California
Hobbies/interests: documentary films, video games, paintball, cute animals
Major: engineering

What are your post-graduation plans? I will be attending the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the fall after graduation, where I will be pursuing a Master’s degree in Higher Education Administration.

What inspired you to pursue a career in higher education? Near the end of the last semester, I started thinking about what I wanted to do after graduation. That was a long and nostalgic process where I reflected on my times at Mudd and all the things that I did, all the things that happened to me, what I liked, what I didn’t like. I came to the conclusion that my college education took place both inside and outside of the classroom.

I don’t think there’s much more I can say about the academics at Mudd than what’s already out there, but when I talk about education taking place outside the classroom, for me it means:

  • Having the opportunities to become more involved with the Harvey Mudd community through the different offices under the Dean of Students office (Institutional Diversity, Community Engagement, Health and Wellness, etc)
  • Learning to process and resolve problems in my life, academics or otherwise
  • Critically thinking about what I was learning in and out of the classroom and how I can live the Harvey Mudd mission statement, not just recite it

I’m very glad I chose to go to Mudd, where we espouse values of excellence, awareness, and involvement in our mission statement as well as in what we do. I understand sometimes we forget those values as we’re up to our eyeballs in work (like any other college students), or drooling over promises of six figure salaries waiting after graduation, and I think the institution has the potential to grow and become even better. I think this i s a unique place where the intersection between an excellent education and transformative personal development is an attainable reality.

So as a beneficiary of both academic and co-curricular education, I’m looking forward to a career in higher education where I can improve the college educational experience for future generations to help people become not only academically but also culturally competent.

Did Mudd help you in your post-graduation planning (faculty/staff, career services, classes)? Actually, Mudd was instrumental in helping me with graduate school and post-graduation plans. In particular, several faculty members and all of the wonderful folks in the Dean of Students Office have been amazing mentors to me as I made the big decisions about my future plans. They’ve been nothing but supportive of me, and I’m very thankful for them. If you’re a student reading this, make sure to get to know the faculty and staff. They are amazing people who are dedicated to making Mudd an amazing experience for everyone.

Misha at West Dorm

Misha at West Dorm

Misha Vysotskiy, PhD in Pharmacogenomics at UC San Francisco
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Hobbies/interests: Education and travel
Major: Mathematical and Computational Biology

What are your post-graduation plans? I will be returning north to UC San Francisco! I am currently working with a UCSF lab on my senior thesis (I will likely do my graduate work with a different lab).

What inspired you to pursue a PhD in pharmacogenomics? After working for some years in more theoretical aspects of biology, I wanted to move to the applied field (or as we call it now, “translational”) of biomedicine. Most of the clinical and phramaceutical scientists that I had met when visiting graduate programs agreed that computational biology is becoming an important part of their studies. One thing I love about the program I’m doing is that it is quite loose and open – while my coursework will train me in pharmacological biology, I will more likely be working on identifying disease-causing genes (or maybe even going back to tehory!)

How has Mudd helped prepare you for your specific research interests? Any classes/projects in particular? HMC’s biology training is very much focused on preparation for graduate school. Of course, we do a formal thesis, but there are other parts of academic life that you learn how to do. As part of our thesis, we had to write a grant. In an experimental molecular biology course, we were literally studying genes that nobody had studied previously. In an advanced seminar, we were asked to write a review paper in the style of Nature Reviews – I wager this is not a common undergraduate experience. I also attribute my preparation to going abroad. Seeing how people think about problems outside of Mudd – even outside of the US – provides a fresh new perspective. In Budapest, I took a class on computational biology that was taught by M.D.’s. That was the class from which I had first heard of pharmacogenomics and the application of CS to medicine – and here I am about to pursue that further.

Sophia with fellow members of Adventure Club on top of the St. Jacinto Peak Left to Right: Mo Zhao '15, Spenser Andersen '16, Gourav Khadge '15, Nicole Kowtko '15, Sophia Williams '15, and Cleo Stannard '15

Sophia with fellow members of Adventure Club on top of the St. Jacinto Peak
Left to Right: Mo Zhao ’16, Spenser Anderson ’16, Gourav Khadge ’15, Nicole Kowtko ’15, Sophia Williams ’15, and Cleo Stannard ’15

Sophia Williams, Watson Fellowship and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
Hometown: Alameda, CA
Hobbies/interests: Reading, running, and hanging out with friends
Major: Engineering

What is the Watson Fellowship and how did you decide on your project for it? The Watson Fellowship invests in potential leaders by providing a one-year grant to study a subject internationally. I chose my project after reflecting on what is most important to me. The Watson project is about studying something you are undeniably passionate about. Social justice is incredibly important to me, so I chose to study poverty, which is at the root of global inequality. Specifically, my project is focused on determining the efficacy of microloans, small business growth, and grants on ending poverty.

Did Mudd help you in your post-grad planning (faculty/staff/alumni help, any classes you took, etc)? The committee of professors who supervise the Watson were incredible resources to me. I would meet with them once or twice a week to get feedback and talk through my ideas about the fellowship.

What are your plans after the Watson Fellowship? While applying for the Watson, I also applied to graduate school. Thus, when I return from the Watson I will be going to Stanford to pursue a PhD in Electrical Engineering. MY goal is to be a researcher either in academia or in industry.