5 Year Reunion Recap
Hello Everyone!
Kudos to Katie Leo our excellent reunion chair, and to Evelyn Kao and Jahnavi Swamy for coordinating our reunion gift campaign. Thanks to those who made it back for our successful weekend. Now the 5th-year Reunion Edition:
Thunderstorms hit so our Baker Rooftop party ended up in Baker Dining. Despite this, we had a great time listening to selections from our DJ, Ivan Gevirtz. Ivan is currently working in wireless internet in Seattle with Robert Frederick, Sebastien Morel and Jason Sugg '96. Andy Kim completed his PhD in Course 3: "I was hooded yesterday and today I'm at a Baker House party. Go figure." Matt Becker completed his PhD in Course 6. His wife, Holly (Goo) Becker is a judge advocate general at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, AL. David Frohman and I both completed our MBAs at Sloan. After David and Maria Palacios get married in Cape Cod this summer, they are moving to Argentina.
After Saturday's Class Clambake, I attended the Great Court Gala with Erin Lavik, Stan Thompson, Jay Kumar and Ranee Mehra. Erin, a McCormick floor tutor, is doing a PhD in Course 3 in biopolymers for spinal cord regeneration. She won a graduate teaching award this year. Stan will be practicing Intellectual Property law with Morrison & Foerster in L.A. after vacationing in Cabo St. Lucas. Jay is at Booz-Allen Hamilton in NYC. Ranee is continuing her residency in internal medicine at NYU, and will be marrying Sunil Khanna this summer. We ran into Chris Merkel and Chantel Michailidis, who are planning a September wedding at Hammond Castle in Gloucester, MA. Chris recently joined MolecularWare, Inc., a Cambridge startup company which won the 1999 $50K competition. I also saw Jose Sia, who is a research associate for George Washington University's Center for Equity and Excellence in Education and is rock-climbing at Seneca Valley, WV.
On Sunday morning we won second place in the Reunion Row. Captains Lizette Arce and Janet Wang teamed with Prashant Doshi, Fouad Saad, Shawn Hanegan, Quoc Tran, Brit Gould and Emily Hanna '00 to row under the superior coxing of Gus "#5" Leotta. Lizette and Prashant are in NYC working for the city's welfare programs. Janet is enjoying cycling in the Bay area, and Quoc is doing IT consulting for Kana Communications in San Francisco. Fouad graduated from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and will be in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Shawn is working for Raytheon, organizing events for MIT alums in greater Boston, and is getting involved in the local political scene. Brit is in Raleigh, NC at IBM where he is developing PCs with pre-configured software. Gus is an orthopaedic surgery resident for the army in Augusta, GA. He hates the army but loves the medicine. He is playing hockey to keep his sanity.
After enjoying Dim Sum at the MIT Sailing Pavilion, was the Tech Challenge Games. There were valiant attempts at the poetry contest by Jonathan Hardy, Beth Siers and Donny Wong. Jon is currently in Austin working for Trilogy. Beth is enjoying her job with the MIT Libraries, and Donny (started at MIT, finished at Williams) is in grad school at Harvard doing biotech. The 2.70 design contest saw innovation by Shawn Hanegan, Amy Koo, Bonnie Kim, and her husband Carlos Niederstrasser, among others. Amy has left Andersen Consulting to pursue a dual-degree program in Management and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Stanford. Bonnie and Carlos are in Maryland, where Bonnie is working at Orbital. Ellen Block, currently pursuing her PhD in Biology (immunology) at Cornell Medical School, Mindy Davis, at Stanford pursuing her PhD in Chemistry and Steven Johnson, pursuing a PhD in Course 8 (photonic crystals) showed style in the Tuition Riot event. Jennifer Tschudy-Carlstrom helped with the paper airplane contest. She and her husband, Brian Carlstrom, bought a home in Los Altos Hills. Camille Anderson, pursuing her PhD in Chemical Engineering (protein interactions) at Berkeley, avoided getting wet in the water balloon-glove toss. All in all, we had a fun time!
A run-down on others I saw during the weekend:
Karl Munkelwitz will be returning to MIT for a Masters in Architecture. Jocelyn Chen joined the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT. Nathan Shnidman is working on a Course 6 PhD (wireless communications and systems) Akim Aina, a floor tutor at New House, and Iliana Fujimori are both working on their Course 6 PhDs in circuit design. Iliana will be vacationing in Cancun with Ruth Lim, who will be starting her radiology residency at MGH in July. Marina On hopes to finish her PhD at Harvard Medical School (immunology) in a couple of years. Clare (Yang) Dye finished her degree at Harvard Business School. Jeff Schwartz is working in B2B marketplaes for i2 Technologies in Cambridge. James Brookes was in th Ivory Coast with the Peace Corps for 2 years. He is now developing civil engineering and surveying software for Carlson Software in Boston. Richard Davis is in business development at Virtual Ink, and recently bought a condo in Central Square. Brad Pearson is attending BU Medical School and is engaged to Samantha Mahoney (Simmons '96).
Shehry Rahman is working in Equity Capital Markets for Goldman Sachs in NYC. Mehran Islam in doing e-commerce strategy for Diamond Technology Partners. Linsey Francesca Paik is building a practice as a holistic health counselor. Stella Lymberis graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and interned at St Luke's Roosevelt in Radiation Oncology at NYU. Jessie (Browning) Paul completed her PhD from Albert Einstein in Microbiology.
Colin Page and his wife, Jennifer, are in NJ where Colin is practicing labour and employment law with Pitney Hardin Kipp & Szuch. Roderick Diaz is planning bus and rail systems with Booz-Allen Hamilton in Washington, DC. Arvind Malhan is at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a VC firm in DC. When Dexter Mootoo is not pumping gas for Schlumberger, he is playing squash and soccer in Houston. Elron Yellin spent three weeks in West Africa studying drum and dance.
Erika Hanley-Onken completed her MBA and will be volunteering at an ecolodge in Bolivia for a month, then going to Macchu Piccho. She returns Andersen Consulting in Chicago in the fall. Anne Chwang is in grad school at the University of Minnesota in Chemical Engineering (organic transistors). Mukund Venkatesh recently moved from Atlanta to California with McKinsey. Jocelyn Nee is completing her PhD in optical MEMS (making ultra-flat and ultra-fast optical scanners for display and switching applications) at Berkeley. She will join ONIX Microsystems, a startup company doing optical switching, in Richmond, CA. Pareen Dhalla, a payload systems engineer for TRW in LA, is looking forward to an exciting July 4th weekend in L.A. with alums. Kuni Takahashi is doing research on video compression (MPEG) for Sony and playing baseball in Tokyo. I will be in Tokyo as a project manager for Nippon Stryker, the Japanese business unit of Stryker Medical. Drop me a line if you come to the area!