Alumni Stories
To give you a better idea of some of the roads Techers choose to travel, we reconnected with some recent graduates. Here’s what they said about what they’ve been doing with their Tech education.
Megan Greenfield
Tom Flecher
Ted Jou
Jeremy Pitts
Robb Rutledge
Kathryn Todd
Phil Rodriguez
Melissa Sáenz
Dave Tytell
Keri Ryan
Jim Pierce
Megan Greenfield
Class of 2004
Chemical Engineering
I am currently a second-year graduate student working on my PhD in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern. My research focuses on synthesizing and characterizing—both experimentally and theoretically—biomaterials for tissue regeneration and drug delivery. As a Homeland Security Fellow, I will be at a national lab next summer working on biological and chemical countermeasures. When interviewing with some of the labs last November, I discovered that one of the lab managers was a member of the same house (Go Lloyd!). It’s amazing how often I run into other Caltech grads!
I think Caltech can be summarized in one word: opportunity. The excellent faculty and research give you the opportunity to develop your technical skills. You will become part of a small but diverse and talented student body that will shape the future. And, really, where else can you be an engineer and make the intercollegiate basketball team?
Tom Fletcher
Class of 2004
Chemistry & Economics
After graduating from Caltech, I left the lab for the courtroom and enrolled at Boalt Hall, the law school at UC Berkeley. Caltech provided all of the analytical tools I have needed to succeed in law school, and Tech's focus on the scientific method and empirical testing allows me to bring a different perspective to my class's study of the law. While I sometimes have to rely on my classmates to teach me about political theory, I get to return the favor by helping them understand when a market is operating efficiently or when evidence is statistically significant.
Caltech also provided a number of initially less obvious benefits. The cooking class I took senior year came in handy at a job interview this fall when I had to order the right bottle of wine for dinner. The survey-design course that instilled a strong suspicion of data quality has come in handy while I've crunched numbers for a professor researching America's declining crime rates. And the myriad of leadership opportunities afforded by Caltech's small size gave me the confidence to stand up and argue in classes, meetings, and, soon, in court.
Now what? This summer I am off to Washington to work for a law firm, handling whatever cases come to our attention. After that, I plan to finish my third year and graduate. Things get much less certain after that, but I hope to spend a year working for a federal judge and then return to being a practicing attorney.
If you are curious about pursuing a legal career and want to know more about how Caltech can provide the first step in that process, feel free to e-mail me at tfletcher@berkeley.edu.
Ted Jou
Class of 2003
Applied and Computational Mathematics
When I came to Caltech, law school definitely wasn't part of the plan, but just three years after graduation I find myself just a semester away from a JD and preparing to take the bar exam. Although I didn't take many law classes during my four years in Pasadena, my experience outside the classroom guided me to where I am today, and my degree has continued to help me along the way.
At Caltech, I was a regular columnist for the student newspaper, a member of the executive committee for the Caltech Y, and President of the student body. I also participated in a host of other student activities and organizations. Alongside the top-notch science education at Caltech are innumerable student clubs and a self-governance structure that includes a student-run honor system and even undergraduate students that read applications and help make decisions for the admissions office. While participating in these extracurricular activities, I realized that I was more interested in law school than science graduate school.
Through a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, I pursued my nonscience interests by conducting a research project with a political-science professor. Through the Beckman Political Internship, I spent a summer on Capitol Hill in the office of Senator Dianne Feinstein. By the beginning of my senior year, I knew that law school was what I wanted to do. After graduation, I headed back east to the University of Virginia School of Law.
My Caltech degree was in applied math, and like all my classmates, I graduated with a strong background in science and engineering. I've found that writing legal briefs isn't so different from writing mathematical proofs, and I've been drawn towards the intersection of law and technology. I spent a summer working in the Computer Crime Section at the Department of Justice, where my supervisor was a lawyer whose grandfather had graduated from Caltech. During the fall of my third year, I helped a physics professor at Virginia—who happened to be a Caltech alumnus—apply for a patent on a method of strengthening axxxxxxx7morphous steel.
After law school, I am headed to the Western District of Tennessee to clerk for a Federal judge. After that, I plan to work for a law firm in Washington, DC, practicing patent law. I'm sure that my Caltech experience will continue to help me in unexpected ways, just as it took me to law school three years ago.
Jeremy Pitts
Class of 2003
Mechanical Engineering
After four years at Caltech, I decided the working world was the best post-graduation route for me. I chose what seemed to be the best opportunity at the time and went to work at Raytheon as a mechanical engineer doing design work. I was assigned to a project building the targeting pod that goes on the F-18 fighter jet. I found that a Caltech degree immediately earned me respect amongst my colleagues and that I had no problem maintaining that respect when I was able to solve problems that were fairly trivial by Caltech standards. I also found that the work ethic that I had developed in order to survive at Caltech helped me to easily surpass any workload expectations of my supervisors.
Unfortunately, the job did not challenge and interest me as much as I had hoped. I found that a large corporate environment was not the best for me. Even though I was doing good work, it seemed that the opportunities for career advancement were based more on seniority for the first several years of your career.
Luckily, an excellent new situation presented itself to me. A friend and former housemate of mine from Caltech helped me get an interview with the company where he was working, one of the Idealab companies called Energy Innovations. I was hired and have been enjoying the work there immensely. We are designing and attempting to inexpensively manufacture an active tracking solar concentrator that will be significantly cheaper than traditional flat-panel solar power. About half of the employees are fellow Caltech graduates, so the environment is a very casual and cooperative one that suits me well. We are able to have a lot of fun at work while still getting an incredible amount accomplished. I have also gotten the opportunity to travel to China to work with our contract manufacture, as well as gain some incredible cultural experiences.
During my first year out of Caltech, I often thought that I could have gone to a much easier (and probably cheaper) college and still ended up in the same place. However, the advances in my career that I have been able to make in the past few months would not have been possible without my Caltech degree. I now have the opportunity to work on a new technology that is both a lot of fun for me and could potentially have a positive impact on the world.
Robb Rutledge
Class of 2002
Biology
May 9, 2003
As I write this, I’m on a plane to Tuvalu, a tiny South Pacific nation that might disappear this century if sea levels rise because of global warming. In a few days, I will be on my way to Vaitupu Island by cargo boat, where I will be teaching at the only high school in the country. I am hoping to return home (after several more months meandering through Polynesia) with DNA samples from the students to help complete the genetic picture of several thousand years of unrecorded Polynesian history.
Since graduation last year, I’ve been traveling on a Watson Fellowship, exploring cultural evolution with scientific methods. I’m a long way from Caltech’s lecture halls, but things couldn’t be going more smoothly—despite my current projects being only distantly related to anything I did at Caltech.
Many biology students complain about the core. After all, since when do biologists need all that math and physics? As biology becomes increasingly computational, however, being able to write programs and understanding the math behind the methods opens many doors. These skills proved useful in the project I just finished in New Zealand, applying biology’s phylogenetic methods to linguistic evolution, and in SURF projects at Harvard (comparing monkey calls using signal processing) and at MIT (analyzing fMRI data from the human brain with my own programs).
Yes, you can do a SURF anywhere. Caltech’s SURF program was happy to let me explore different fields, even when the professors I wanted to work with were at other universities. Armed with my SURF experience, I am prepared for every aspect of the research process—from writing proposals and designing experiments to giving lectures and writing papers. This year’s research has been fantastic, and, as an added bonus, I did it all while traveling around the world. What could be better?
Kathryn Todd
Class of 2001
Physics & Literature
The fall after I graduated, I started a PhD program in physics at Stanford. I’ve joined a research group that’s building a scanning tunneling microscope—one that works by allowing electrons to tunnel from an atomically sharp tip to the surface of interest. This instrument will be able to do two neat tricks: it will provide insight into the workings of exotic electronic materials such as high-temperature superconductors, and it will allow us to move single atoms around on a surface.
Grad school is an interesting trade from undergrad life: there are fewer panicked deadlines, but also less time off. You don’t have to stay up all night once a week in order to keep up, but that road trip to Alaska is just no longer in the cards. I knew something had changed when I started waking up after seven hours of sleep instead of nine and a half. I thought it must be premature aging—you weren’t supposed to start waking up early until you were at least 45. Then I realized that I was no longer trying to make up lost sleep.
One thing that I didn’t expect was the Caltech mythology out here. I had gotten so used to the reaction in nonacademic places like my hometown (“Caltech—is that in San Luis Obispo?”) that I assumed it would be universal. So I was surprised when my first-year advisor said, “Oh, you’re from Caltech—you can probably waive these class requirements.” And again, when discussing the qualifying exam with other first-years: “Oh, you’re from Caltech—I’m sure you’ll ace it.” Sure. Actually, as it’s turned out, I do feel that Caltech gave me an excellent preparation for grad school, and I’m grateful for this even when I remember that it was purchased with four years of perpetual sleep debt.
Phil Rodriguez
Class of 1998
Engineering and Applied Science
Above all, graduating from Caltech opened a ton of doors for me that would not have been open had I gone to school elsewhere.
Caltech's reputation definitely helped in my initial job interview process—I had six offers from firms across the country before I graduated. My major allowed me to better position myself as a business-minded technical person. I leveraged my Caltech training at Comrise Technology (a New Jersey-based IT consulting firm), where I was a senior account executive, and still use it today as a regional account executive at Texas.net, a Texas-based regional internet service provider. Though I sometimes did feel as if I was drinking water from a fire hose (that famous Tech saying), the problem-solving skills I attained while at Caltech I use throughout my life. Whether it's trying to negotiate a complex collocation service deal, or just trying to better juggle my time between work, business trips, and watching SpongeBob SquarePants with my son, Mikey, my experiences at Caltech allow me to look at problems analytically and creatively, always thinking outside the box.
Melissa Sáenz
Class of 1998
Biology
My Caltech education brought me back to Caltech. As an undergrad, I became interested in neuroscience through my biology coursework and research opportunities. I think that most people have a great deal of curiosity about how the brain works, and I wanted to devote my career to studying this. So I went to grad school in neurosciences at University of California San Diego. My graduate research was about how visual processing in the human brain is affected by what we pay attention to. Now I have the immense opportunity to be back at Caltech continuing my research as a postdoctoral scholar in Christof Koch's lab (whose class I took as an undergrad). Caltech influenced not only my career but my personal life as well.
Dave Tytell
Class of 1999
Planetary Science
Everyone always praises Caltech for its phenomenal science and engineering programs—with good reason. But little is ever said about the strong liberal arts education it offers. With my Caltech degree, I moved into the world of writing—specifically reporting. After graduation, I received a master’s degree in science journalism and went to work as an editor at Sky and Telescope magazine. With the strong science background Caltech provided me, I was well equipped to converse with scientists about their research. And with my strong liberal arts background, I learned the necessary skills to explain complex research to everyone.
Keri Ryan
Class of 1998
Engineering and Applied Science
I’ve spent the past five years working toward my PhD in civil engineering at UC Berkeley. I have continued researching the behavior of base-isolated buildings, a topic I first explored at Caltech. My advisor and I have made significant progress toward understanding the behavior of asymmetric-plan base-isolated buildings, which tend to twist in earthquakes, and are now working toward studying their rocking and uplift behavior. I have had two papers accepted into peer-reviewed journals, and have submitted two more.
The skills I learned at Caltech prepared me well for the challenges of graduate school. I felt this to be especially true in the first year, when other students were struggling with problem sets that didn’t compare to ones that I had seen at Caltech. Because I had experience with research at Caltech, I was prepared to make the transition from “good student” to “independent researcher”—although this transition is by no means complete.
With about a year remaining before I complete my degree, the future looks bright. I am hopeful that my background will find me well qualified for a variety of career opportunities, either in academia or pursuing interesting research in a nonacademic (corporate or government) environment. While I’m still not sure where I’ll end up, I certainly would not be where I am today without the education and guidance I received at Caltech.
Jim Pierce
Class of 1998
Biology
After attending medical school at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and obtaining my MD degree in 2002, I’m back in Los Angeles. Even though the medical school workload was very different from Caltech’s—the first two years have large volumes of easy work vs. Caltech’s moderate volumes of difficult work, and the second two years require the student to be present at set times in the hospital, while Caltech scheduling is extremely flexible—Caltech was an excellent preparation for medicine. The core curriculum alone satisfies all but two classes for admission to any medical school, which was fortunate for me, since I started out at Caltech as a mathematics and economics major!
Following graduation from medical school, I began my residency in general surgery through the University of Southern California, which sends me to a number of hospitals in the LA area, including the USC University Hospital, the LA County Hospital, and Pasadena's Huntington Hospital. I’ve also had a chance to return to Caltech to teach. This year I’ve taught anatomy and physiology (designed for juniors and seniors interested in medicine) and History of Modern Medicine and Surgery (designed for all students). I hope to take a research sabbatical after my years as a junior resident to study ischemia reperfusion injury and multiple organ failure at USC and Caltech, and intend to pursue a career in cardiothoracic surgery.