Class Notes Archives
July/August 2009 |
August/September 1996 Welcome to another edition of the Class Notes! Congrats to all those who have graduated from MEng programs this year....Send me your current information as soon as you are settled down! Congrats to Loretta Vidos who will be marrying Nicholas Pioch '94, MEng '95 on June 1st at St. Paul Church in Harvard Square! The wedding party includes Bryn Oh, Eliza Fulton, Karin Lin, Jose Elizondo and Ben Moskowitz '94, and "there's just a pile of nerds...er...MIT students/alums that are invited to the wedding!" Loretta writes. She plans on finishing her MEng in EECS in December. Karin, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in physics at UC-Berkeley, has been engaged to Cade Murray '96 as of last New Year's Eve. The two played the leading couple in the MIT Gilbert & Sullivan Players' production of "The Mikado" in fall '94, and are planning a summer 1997 or winter 1997-8 wedding. Karin reports that two other MIT alums in the physics program at Berkeley are Celeste Winant and Ted Baltz. After rotating through various and sundry labs, Victor Holmes and Meghan Bowser have finally settled down into their five year relationships with one professor in the UC Berkeley PhD program in Biology. Victor will be working with Dr. Nick Cozzarelli on enzymes important for general recombination and Meg will be working for Dr. Carolyn Kane on transcription elongation. Stan Thompson, who is at USC law school, spent his spring break with Victor and Meghan this year. They showed him around San Francisco and then went wine tasting in Sonoma County. Stan received an offer from Graham & James (a VERY BIG international firm) for a one-week Intellectual Property Intership this summer. Also in the sunny state of California is Eric Fong, who completed his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and plans to spend the next three quarters of his life away from school (finally!). In August he will be starting a job at Allied Signal Aerospace in Los Angeles. Fred Hernandez recently finished his Master's in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford as well. He writes, "Imagine that!!! A crazy Mexican with a Master's degree. I guess that means I gotta grow up now huh???? NAH!!!! Growing up only leads to growing old and dying. I'm not ready for that yet." Also in California is Beth Siers, who recently accepted a year-long job at PCPA Theatrefest in Santa Maria as one of their costume interns. Karyn Green says that schoolwork in the Nuclear Engineering program at the University of Illinois has kept her pretty busy. She is looking forward to a change of pace this summer, when she will be working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Another person already in the sunny climate of the Southwest is Erika Hanley, who is playing sand volleyball in the desert when she's not working as a Process Engineer in the fab at Intel in Phoenix. The heat is making her feel like a piece of southwestern beef jerky! "No more personal news, just working on my sunburn..." she says. Down south in Hawaii, Eliza Fulton is in the same program as Chad Trujillo in astronomy at the Univeristy of Hawaii. She says the island is beautiful. Speaking of islands, Wynne Kwan, who is in the Masters in City Planning program at Columbia, travelled to Vieques, Puerto Rico, in March to work on a studio project for the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, a community group on the island. Two-thirds of the island, which is located off the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico, is Navy land, and Wynne's project was to come up with a development plan assuming that 8,000 acres of the Navy land would be given back to the Viequenses. She says the island was beautiful and that it was an amazing experience. (She also came back very tan!) At the end of May, she was planning to go to Albania for two weeks with a group of fellow students. They were all on a travel fellowship to study the transition of the communist regime to an open-market economy. After finishing his MEng thesis at the Media Lab, Eugene Lin is off to the west coast to work for Microsoft. He will be a Program Manager in the Multimedia/Games group, and will be living with John Yu, who is also headed for Microsoft. Chris Ellefson is finishing class work and starting his thesis for a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is active in the UBC chapter of his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but says that the Greek system there is much smaller than MITs. This year he was able to compete on the UBC Gymnastics team which came in 2nd in Western Canada, and he also holds a couple of executive positions on the Computer Science Grad Student Society, and the UBC Grad Student Society Council. James Landry didn't like Chicago much at first, but says that the city is growing on him, especially now that he is meeting more people with cars! He has started research with Arieh K"onigl at the University of Chicago on periodic eruptions (called FU Orionis outbursts) in accretion disks of forming stars, and will be staying there for the summer. This summer Alice Lin will be at the Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C. writing a review of the Human Genome Project for the DOE/NIH. She and Carrie B. Miller are at the Kennedy School of Government, located at the Little Red Brick Schoolhouse. Raj Sodhi is hopes to have completed his MEng in EE in June after getting through a killer term. Francesca Paik starts her job with J.P.Morgan in October 1996, and will be living at home in NYC. In her last term at MIT, she was playing Korean drums a lot, and had planned a trip to Texas to perform at KASCON (Korean-American Students' Conference) This summer she was traveling in south-east asia for 3-4 months. Holly Goo, who just finished her MEng in 1E, has received a spot in the JAG Corps. Congrats to Ben Reis, who is a recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. He plans to undertake a two-year project at Cambridge University combining music theory, experimental psychology, cognitive neurscience and computer science in a computer-aided study of music cognition and learning in preparation for a career in medicine and/or research. Garlen Leung is currently living near Albany, N.Y., and is working as a Materials Scientist at General Electric's Corporate Research and Development Centeron some cool projects. He talks to Gilbert Leung a lot, who is still at MIT completing the Course 6 Masters. He's also in contact with CheeKian Ooi, who is working for Salomon Brothers in NYC. Also in the NYC area is Veej Sankaran who is working for Ernst & Young, but is currently doing consulting work in Princeton, N.J. Another empoyee of the same management consulting firm is Ken Vollmer. Pradeep Sreekanthan (who had taken a term off to return to India) and Ling Liao stayed at MIT to complete their Course 3 Masters. Rosalydia Tamayo, another materials person, is now working at Intel in Arizona on a rotation program. Unfortunately, her boyrfriend Albert Lau is far away at Stanford doing the med school thing. In early February, there was a big banquet for _The Tech_ where a number of alumni attended, including Matt Konosky, who is working at King Industries in Connecticut, Eva Moy, who is still at MIT working towards a Masters in Course 2, Sarah Keightley who is working in a biochem lab at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, Pradeep, Patrick Mahoney '94, and many OLDER alums. A good time was had by all. Keith Jackson is still at MIT in the Leaders For Manufacturing Program. He'll be on an internship at Pratt and Whitney for the summer and fall, then he'll be back to finish up next spring. In June of '97, he'll get two masters degrees, one from Sloan and an Aero/Astro degree from the School of Engineering. He's the only Aero/Astro student in his LFM class, and encourages any other Aero/Astro grads with a manufacturing interest to apply to the program. Anthony Patire is continuing on in Course 6; he is in the PhD program. Others in the Boston area: Sumer Johal is working in the Operations Research department of Analog Devices in Wilmington, MA. Roberto Almeida is working for Pilot Software. Kimberly Mazzocco is working at Thomson Financial Services, First Call Corporation, in Boston, while taking a couple of years off before Columbia law school. And I'm still plugging away at IDX Systems Corporation, a company which develops health care information systems here in Boston. I actually went down to Florida for a week-long conference on software testing and had a wonderful time enjoying the weather and watching a space shuttle launch! That's all for now folks...Those of you getting married, send some pictures my way! |