Class Notes Archives
July/August 2009 |
November/December 1997 Hi everyone! I hope that you are doing well! I encourage all of you to start some activities in your area for local Class of 95rs. If you need help getting in touch with the MIT club in your area, check the Alumni web page or send me e-mail. Now for the notes.... In the military world, Navy Lt. Christine McManus recently completed her first solo flight. She is undergoing primary flight training with Helicopter Training Squadron Eight, Naval Air Station Whiting Field, Milton, FL. The basic course includes 65 flight training hours and the initial steps of the Navy Integrated Flight Training System. Her follow-up training with jets, helicopters or multi-engine aircraft will lead to designation as a naval aviator. Andrea Jensen was commissioned as a Lt in the US Air Force at graduation, and has been stationed at Edwards AFB, CA, along with several other MIT grads, for the past 2 years. She was a program manager in the AF's Phillips Lab Solar Propulsion Group, but was accepted to the Air Force flight training to program. She is now at Laughlin AFB in Del Rio, TX for the year-long program. Overseas, Chee-Kiang Lim spent the past 2 years in the Singapore Army (it is compulsory there for men). He was commissioned as a second lieutenent after half a year at Officer Cadet School and was promoted to full lieutenent just before he finished up. He is currently working as the Assistant Director of Trade at the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Singapore, dealing with bilateral and multilateral trade relations like in APEC and WTO. Out on the west coast, Patrick Piccione has started a PhD at Caltech, "the most beautiful campus i've ever seen," he says. He is supposed to research formation of zeolites--so far he's been making a lot of chalk-like powders (39 batches!) Matthew Eldridge is at Stanford working on a PhD in computer graphics. Stephanie Ford graduated from Stanford MSME in June. She is staying at Stanford and doing MEMS development until Christmas and then returning to Timken Corporation in Ohio. Christopher Barrington-Leigh is about to start his 3rd year of grad school at Stanford. He is studying red sprites, elves, and associated newly-discovered phenomena. He climbs when he can and will be spending this autumn in Antarctica for research. He misses MIT. Lan Hoang is working in the area of electronic packaging and flip chip technology, and recently moved from National Semiconductor to LSI Logic in the Bay Area. Jon Michelson is working at Silicon Graphics, and Ivan Oei is at Qualcomm. Anthony Patire completed his MS in Course 6 last February. Afterwards, he spent two months trekking through Europe from London to Istanbul and back. Now he's working for TRW in Redondo Beach, CA. He's sharing a double with Ken Vollmer, who is making video games for a small computer startup. Also working at TRW is Frederic Bontemps. Mukund Venkatesh is back in San Diego from France. He has been hanging out at the beach and relaxing with his parents, and will start working with McKinsey, Atlanta, in mid-September. The next time we see him he'll be "eating grits and talking with a nice southern drawwwwl!" Amy Koo is finishing with her project in Kansas City. She is getting promoted to Consultant in September - still with Andersen Consulting in San Francisco despite all the traveling she's been doing. She plans to celebrate her promotion with a vacation to Spain and Portugal. Okay, Amy...I'm jealous! Keith Jackson recently started working for Boeing's 777 Division in Seattle, Washington. Matt Knapp has moved several times, spent a while wandering across the country, did UNIX for food in the Silicon Valley, and now is happily doing full time aerospace again in Seattle, Washington. He's working as a wind tunnel test program engineer for a sub-orbital space plane development project at Pioneer Rocketplane. Eugene Lin is still busy at Microsoft working on Windows98 and NT5. Recently, he started playing golf. His next task is to learn how mortgages work and to buy a cool condo. He and Joanna Law '98 recently went to LA to visit Eric Fong, Dave Rahn, and Linda Chien. He claims that Seattle is gorgeous in the summertime...I don't know Euge...any place where Bill Gates is king scares me! Down in Texas, Diane Hodges is working for Motorola. She just purchased a house and says that it's very exciting being a homeowner and a landlord (a friend is renting a room from her). Jon Hardy was living in Japan for a year teaching English to Japanese children, and returned to the US in February. He says, "I'm really glad I went, and it was a great experience to live in another country, but I really wish I had done it through another job. As an MIT grad, having a four-year-old kid calling you 'poo-poo' in Japanese doesn't exactly inspire a strong sense of job satisfaction." He's now back in school, working towards an MS in computer engineering at Mississippi State University, and is also an RA at his old high school, a residential magnet school in Columbus, MS. Morgan Slade has joined the ranks in the NYC area. After a year of Investment Banking and Venture Capital work he has started trading derivatives and structuring derivative products for a large hedge fund in mid-town Manhattan called The Millburn Ritchfield Corporation. Ashwin Balagopal is at Mt. Sinai medical school in Manhattan. Ranee Mehra just returned to New York from a 5-week internship in Puerto Rico. She was there along with other members of her NYU Medical class. Veena Sankappanavar, who is attending medical school at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, just completed an internship at the World Health Organization in Geneva. She developed a manual for doctors to instruct them on the dangers of smoking. Karyn Green graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January with an MS in Nuclear Engineering. She's now back at MIT's Nuclear Engineering Program to finish up graduate studies. Lee Zamir finished his M.Eng. out of Lincoln Labs in December 1996. After a three month travel break, Lee started working at Bose Corporation where he has already worked on half a dozen product and technology demos, three of which will be in stores and used by customers in September. He is living in Brighton with 3 other frisbee players (two of whom went to MIT) and is happily settled in for at least a little while. Alice Lin graduated from Harvard in June with her Masters in Public Policy. She is now an Economic and Policy Analyst at Genzyme Corporation in their internal consulting group doing corporate strategy as it relates to changing public policies. She says getting off at Kendall T station reminds her of undergrad days at MIT...Because parking is a pain on Beacon Hill, where she now lives, she had to drive her car one full week from Boston back to San Diego. She "saw some serious roadkill in the midwest, and almost had to outrun a tornado!" Erika Schutte keeps thinking that her life is boring, but upon reflection, she did jump out of an airplane and has plans to go white water rafting, vacationing in spain and to finally get a place of her own. The funding for these adventures comes from her day job at Analog Devices here in the Boston area. Jayant Kumar will be leaving Booz-Allen Hamilton, and starting his MBA at Harvard Business School this fall. Carrie Miller graduated from the Harvard JFK School of Government in June with a Master of Public Policy degree in Science and Technology Policy. Her master's thesis was entitled "The Future of Domain Names." She began working for American Management Systems, an infotech cosulting firm, in August, and is currently on site in Columbus, Ohio, on a project with the state government welfare reform process. This past June, Loretta (Vidos) Pioch, and her husband Nick '94 accompanied Jose Elizondo to England, where the Brighton Orchestra performed his composition "Estampas Mexicanas". This concert was the culmination of the tour of England and Scotland in which the orchestra presented his work to enthusiastic audiences. The tour was so successful that a member of parliament requested to present it in a concert at the Royal Pavillion in Brighton (southern England) this past July 9, which was quite spectacular, and Jose got commissioned by the city of Brighton to write an orchestral piece to celebrate the millenium. The Sydney premiere of "Estampas Mexicanas" is coming up this September and Canada is next. Congratulations, Jose! Amy Swanson has been living in her home town of Minneapolis since graduation, working for Honeywell, Inc. Until July of this year, she was a Production Engineer, supporting several different commercial/industrial gas valve and motor assembly lines as well as CNC machining cells. In July she started working as a mechanical design engineer in Honeywell's Gas Systems team, which designs products mainly for residential heating applications, like furnace components, valves, etc. Stacy Heen is still working as a planner for Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas in her hometown of Lincoln, NE. Work is keeping her busy but she always finds time for running, cooking, and hanging out with friends. In June she was a teaching assistant for a negotiation workshop given at Harvard Law School to practicing attorneys. After getting over the initial fear of trying to "teach" experienced lawyers from around the world basic negotiation skills, she had a fantastic, wonderful, challenging, and fun time and enjoyed being back in Boston again. She will be going salmon fishing with her dad at Lake Michigan over Labor Day, and her next big international trip in the works is a two-week tour of Israel and Greece with her mom next March. Steve Hwang is now working at LucasArts Entertainment Company, the computer gaming division of Lucas. (they created classics such as Dark Forces, Rebel Assault and more recently Shadows of the Empire, Outlaws, and X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter.) He works in association with the Jedi Knight Team as a level designer, creating the world for the player to experience. While it's not architecture, he's using a lot of the same skills, designing not real worlds but virtual ones. He still can't believe he gets paid to play and build games. He writes that Juintow Lin plans to return to MIT this fall for a Masters in Architecture after a year in Venuzuela teaching. Trina Gavieres works in LA for "The Young and the Restless" and just got a pickup truck. Janet Woods is in Alberquerque working for some sort of building contractor and also got a pickup recently and Arley Kim was accepted to the ETH in Zurich Switzerland for their Architecture program, so she's brushing up on her German and will be leaving at the end of August. Last he heard, Jim Gouldstone was a freelance webpage designer. At the time of this writing, nuptials are pending for Clara Yang, who will be marrying Brian Dye '94 in Cincinnati, OH, where both work for Procter and Gamble. Amy Singer and John Guzek got married on May 31, 1997 at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. Many MIT alums attended, including: Agnieszka Reiss, Alisa Benson, Rose Marino, Rick Boardman, JD Smith, Brad Brewer, Morgan Slade, Sandy Joung, Nicole Wainwright, Chitra Vishwanathan, Jodi Fingerman, Laura Vojvodich, Heather Lee, Sabrina Kwon, Tom Hospodar, and Brian Davison. Congratulations to the new couple! (I hope the picture was included in this issue of the Tech Review...looks around for it!) Stefanie Moses married Sergio Rubio II on July 4, 1995. Last November they purchased a duplex in Raymond, NH and ever since she has been busy renovating the barn and property for her horses, Lacrosse and Liberti. Her veterinary aspirations have been put on hold, possibly indefinitely, and she has started a web design business. She is the Class of 1995 webmaster and has done a terrific job with our page. Be sure to check it out once it moves to its new location on the ANS server at MIT! There are definitely some great things happening among members of our class, but I'm afraid I do have some bad news to deliver. Timothy Michalak, an SAE who transferred to MIT second semester sophomore year from Northeastern, passed away of brain cancer at Beth Israel Hospital on March 25, 1997. After receiving a BS in Mechanical Engineering, he took a job at Beth Israel Hospital in conjunction with Harvard Medical School in orthopedic biomechanics. His work there centered around the prevention of hip fractures in the elderly. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in October 1995 and was responding to treatment, but his health took a turn for the worse in mid-March. He was an active member of SAE and was the tight-end on the MIT football team. He also volunteered to help handicapped children learn to ski. We pass on our deepest sympathies and sincere condolences to his friends and family. A memorial fund has been established to provide a scholarship to a graduating senior from Peabody High School, Timothy's alma mater, interested in pursuing an engineering degree. If you would like more information about the fund, e-mail JulieAnn Villa '96. |