Class Notes Archives
July/August 2009 |
November/December 1999 Hello Everyone! Wow...The end of the 90's already! Where has the time gone?? Be sure to mark your calendars for our 5th year reunion - June 1-4, 2000. Planning will be getting underway soon for the event. If you'd like to help (you don't have to be in Boston to volunteer), please contact our reunion coordinator - Katie Leo (katiemay@alum.mit.edu). Now on with the notes...Congratulations to all of you who were engaged or married or accepted to grad school! Best of luck in your new endeavors! Shalini Verma and Rohit Gupta are excited about returning to Boston from Cleveland. Shalini will be attending Harvard Business School as a Ford-sponsored student. Rohit started a residency in Emergency Medicine this summer at the Boston City Hospital. They celebrated their two-year wedding anniversary in June. Shalini is currently recovering from reconstructive ACL surgery for a ligament torn during a ski trip to Colorado. After four years of fun in the Southern California sun at Amgen, Dianna Goldenson is headed back to Beantown to attend law school at Boston College. Chris Merkel and Chantel Michailidis were engaged in May. They are planning a Sept. 2000 wedding at Hammond Castle in Gloucester, MA. Chris recently attended the wedding of Martin Lewis and Darby Faulhaber on July 17, 1999 in York, Maine. The lucky couple were joined by other members of the Theta Xi '95 pledge class Mike Evans, Colin Page, Jason Jarboe, Jefferson Howel, Chris Rodriguez, and Leonard Kimble. Martin is an engineer with Hazeltine Ocean Systems in Braintree, MA. The start-up http://www.channelwave.com founded by Dan Housman and Ron Schmelzer '97 was recently venture financed by Softbank, Blue Rock, and Lazard Technology Partners. After two years of working at Sharon High School in MA, Heather Wages will be taking a new teaching position in the Springfield, MA area at the high school she attended! At this school she will be teaching chemistry (instead of the chemistry/physics combination she had been doing) and is looking forward to reviving the school's drama club in the near future. Clara (Yang) Dye will be moving to Boston this fall and starting an MBA at Harvard Business School in January. She's excited to be returning to Boston after 3 years in the midwest. She visited Holly (Goo) Becker and Matt Becker in Boston over Memorial Day Weekend. Matt is working for Sun. Holly finished law school and was studying for the bar exam. Jeanie Cherng is still in Boston working on her PhD at MIT. Krista Tibbs is working for Genzyme Corporation in Cambridge, MA, and is living in Malden. "No husband, no children, no pets," she reports. For the last two years, Gina Kang has been working for a consulting group at Lotus. She never left Cambridge after graduation, and she has been living in Central Square with Doug Muir '94 and her lovely cat, Betty. She's very happy to tell everyone that she's "FINALLY getting married to Doug next April in the MIT Chapel!" On May 22, 1999, Shraddha Dalal got married to Ravi Munver in Teaneck, NJ. Mavyn McAuliffe, Ranee Mehra, and Ranjini Srikantiah were bridesmaids and Jonathan Stiber '92 was one of Ravi's groomsmen. Shraddha enjoyed seeing a good number of her friends from MIT, including: Holly (Goo) Becker, Matt Becker, Kimberly Cornwell '94, Joel Dawson '96, Kristen Lohman, Ross Yu, Jean-Emile Elien '96 and Malinda Lutz '96. After the wedding, the couple spent two fun-filled weeks honeymooning in Hawaii. Shraddha is spending the summer working in the Finance Group at IBM in Research Triangle Park, NC and enjoying time with her husband who is a surgery resident at Duke. In the fall she will be returning to Philadelphia to finish her MBA at Wharton. Ashwin Balagopal recently came back from Cambodia where he helped to set up a teaching hospital in Siem Reap (near Angkor Wat.) Now he's finishing his fourth year of medical school at Mount Sinai in New York. If anyone is interested in helping out a developing world hospital, he'd be happy to put people in touch (ashwin@alum.mit.edu). After four years of living in New York City working in investment banking and management consulting, Jenn Chow is moving to Philadelphia to attend Wharton Business School at UPenn in the fall. She is really looking forward to being a student again! "It will be a nice two year break from the corporate world." Bonnie (Kim) Niederstrasser and Carlos Niederstrasser (Princeton '94) were married in June 1998. They had an impressive turnout for the wedding including people from all over the world. All the MITers bonded together with a terrific ad-lib performance of the MIT Engineers song during the reception in protest to the Princetonians in the crowd who would not stop doing their Princeton cheers throughout the reception. Bonnie and Carlos are now enjoying their new, less stressful life in the Washington DC area. Michelle Vokac graduated from the Medical College of Virginia in May, after which she and her boyfriend vacationed in Prague. They had a great time seeing her relatives and visiting romantic castles. Michelle just started her intern year at the College. She'll be doing one year of internal medicine before entering anesthesiology. Joe Chang is having a great time doing his residency in ob-gyn at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Kitty Wong is also at Parkland doing Psychiatry . Joe reports that Kitty and Brian Davies got married this year. Brian is getting his PhD at Southwestern Medical school.
Lan Hoang has been working for about 2 years at LSI Logic. He was recently engaged to his high school sweetheart, Cindy Chin (Berkeley '97). They are planning to get married in January 2000 and to stay in the Bay Area. After four (hectic, rewarding) years at Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Raaj Chitaley is joining the gold rush in California; he starts his MBA at Stanford in the fall. He looks forward to meeting many classmates in Northern California -- including those who've IPOed! He also reported that he ran into Andrew Tseng at Tom Tierney's wedding in June. Andrew is currently working on a PhD at the University of Wisconsin. Scott Carpenter received his MSAA at the University of Washington and is now working at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, CA. He sized parts for the X-33 rocket plane and the X-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The nearby annual Edwards AFB air show in the fall is highly recommended! Alex Backer is studying neural coding, olfaction and pattern recognition in pursuit of a PhD in neurobiology at Caltech. He will soon be getting married to Eva Peral, "a beautiful, nice and bright Spanish gal." Dan Brown reports that Jen Szostak was recently married to Jason Harper at a winery on the top of a mountain overlooking all of Silicon Valley. The wedding was lovely; it was a clear Sunday morning, and even the Justice of the Peace was grinning. Other MIT-related people at the wedding included Anca Mosoiu, Bob Kindel, Nathan Wilmes '96, Pat Hwang, Owen Wessling, Naomi Sweitzer, Jessie Stickgold-Sarah '96, Sarinda Newell '94, Eli Dart, Steve Wadlow, Andrew Grant '93, Abbe Cohen '96, Bert Dvornik '98, T.J. Finley '96, and a whole bunch of spouses and significant others. Eugene Lin is still at Microsoft working on Windows 2000. He says Seattle was beautiful this summer! Back in June he saw Ted Ko '94 at Swing Camp Catalina (which was a blast!!!!). Khoa Tran moved up to Seattle for his medical residency at University of Washington. Erika Schutte reports that Jeanne Thienprasit & Scott Kesapradist will be getting married in September in Minnesota. Jon Michelson is leaving SGI to take his chances at a startup called Growth Networks. He's pretty psyched to be giving a startup a shot! Brett Reid is busy founding a software company to develop virtual reality programs for K-12 classroom instruction, as well as for corporate training. After spending a year in Japan as a missionary, Jonathan Kohl returned to the U.S. and joined Eli Lilly & Co. in their market research department. He hopes to go back to Japan someday soon, but for now he is enjoying his time in the midwest. Ricardo Campbell and LaTaunynia (Flemings) Campbell '97 were married on August 2, 1997 in Nashville, Tennessee. They are currently living in New York City with their 4-year old daughter Asha. They will be moving to Okinawa, Japan in early August. After two years with TRW in Redondo Beach California, Anthony Patire has decided to quit his job, sell his motorcycle, his car, and most of his worldly possessions, and to walk the Earth. His journey begins in Japan, where he will be teaching English for a year. His message: "Sayonara, my tomodachis!" That's all for now, folks! Keep those notes rolling and best wishes for the new year!
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