I graduated from Swarthmore in June 2008 with a B.S. degree in Engineering. When I first came to Swat, I was not completely sure about pursuing engineering and therefore, kept my options open. But after two semesters of engineering courses, I loved the department. The faculty were very supportive and available, and my fellow classmates were fun people to do engineering with. Working on my senior project is one of the most exciting and memorable times at Swarthmore for me.

After graduation, I joined MIT to pursue Phd in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. My experience as a tutor for the engineering department at Swat has proved invaluable to me in my graduate school as I am working as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course at MIT. The rigor of Swarthmore and my experience as a tutor prepared me to well enough to be able teach the class.

If you wish to contact me, please can do so through Professor Cheever.

I graduated from Swarthmore in 2008 with a B.S. in Engineering. I started my time at Swat with only an idea that I wanted to do engineering, pursued EE through my sophomore year, then finally settled on Civil (Structural) Engineering in the beginning of my Junior year. After I graduated, I decided to pursue a Ph.D in Structures at UC Berkeley, which is where I am currently. I have recently decided the Ph.D is not for me and I will finish Berkeley with an M.S. in Structures and then continue on to Architecture School (hopefully).

Swarthmore Engineering was a very comprehensive experience and I have not felt in the slightest way that its perceived lack of topical focus has hurt me in my graduate studies. In fact, Swat's Engineering taught me fundamental problem solving skills that can be applied to anything you encounter, making you into a very effective learner and problem solver.

What I enjoyed most about Swat Engineering was the community. While I was there, Sam Garcia ('08) and I completed our E90 Design Project by entering Swarthmore into the AISC/ASCE Student Steel Bridge Design Competition for the first time. With help from Prof. Siddiqui, Prof. Orthlieb, and Smitty, the enterprising Swat ASCE Student chapter helped us design, fabricate, and assemble our bridge in the competition, landing us 4th out of 9 in the region. Hopefully this year ('08 / '09) they will take home first and go to Nationals!

If you wish to contact me, you can do so through professor Siddiqui.

Just a few months out of Swarthmore, it's rather odd being considered an alumnus. And yet, here I am! I received my B.S. in June '08 with a minor in Spanish. In the department I focused mainly in electrical engineering, but my ultimate goal is to end up working with biomedical devices and instrumentation. While at Swat I was an active member of MULTi, Rhythm 'n Motion, and SCF. I also worked as a tour guide in Admissions (we need that engin perspective!) and dabbled in many other clubs and activities. I was also fortunate enough to spend a semester in Madrid, Spain studying Spanish language and culture. It IS possible to be an engineer and study abroad! I also received a Starfield Summer Research grant to spend a summer in Costa Rica and Honduras repairing medical equipment alongside the biomedical technician in the public hospital, an amazing experience that incorporated both of my academic pursuits.

Currently, I am spending a year in Japan teaching English to elementary and junior high school students with the JET program. It's a nice break from engineering, but I'm itching to get back in, so I expect to be attending graduate school either next year or the year after.

If you wish to contact me for any reason, my email is shara1 |at|alum |dot|swarthmore |dot|edu. Perspective or current students alike, if there's anything you think I can help you with, I'm more than happy to do what I can!

I graduated from Swarthmore College with an Honors double major in Computer Science and Engineering. At Swarthmore, I took the core engineering courses including Digital Signal Processing, Solid State Physics, Computer Architecture and a number of directed reading courses in Parallel Computer Architecture, DSP Hardware Programming and Computer Graphics. In spite of its academic rigor, the Engineering Program (and Swarthmore College in its entirety) served as the optimal environment to develop my problem-solving skills, which has been invaluable at work today.

I work in Information Technology division of the Investment Bank at JPMorganChase. Each IT group is aligned to a particular business of the Bank; my group serves the Global Credit Risk Management business. My primary responsibility is to develop Internet Applications for our business clients. For example I was part of the team responsible for developing a platform to allow efficient monitoring of the Firm's credit exposure in differentIndustries. In addition, I also continue to play significant roles in other non-development projects such as our group's adaptation of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) framework to provide a well-defined and repeatable software-development process.

I graduated with the class of '02 and accepted a two year position in the Peace Corps in Tanzania, East Africa. In the four month lag time between graduation and Tz, I designed and built (most of!) a renovation/addition rear porch on my parents' house. In Tanzania, I am teaching A-level Physics to 6th year high school students (roughly equivalent to Swat's Physics 3 and 4 classes but without vectors and 3D) at the Moshi Technical Secondary School in Moshi. I can see Mt. Kilimanjaro (tallest in Africa) from my kitchen every morning and many many students come through my house when they come to Moshi to climb the mountain. My house doubles as the "official" depository of mountain climbing gear for Tanzanian students' school climbs. I'm in charge of maintaining gear and scheduling the many school climbs organized each year by Volunteers in Tz. I've learned a lot about physics, classroom management, Swahili, bargaining in the market, dealing with snakes, repairing boots, cooking from scratch, and a ton of other useful stuff. Some of the biggest challenges have been very uncooperative students, lack of teaching materials, and coming home to a house filled with stinky gear after a long day's teaching! However, it is a remarkable experience and I've had the chance to work with and learn from some of the very dedicated and insightful teachers here. After Close of Service in December, I expect to continue with graduate studies in engineering. However, I am still undecided about whether to choose future profession in industry (structural/restoration engineering?), academia, or as a high school teacher.

So, that's my life in Moshi in a nutshell. At this point I'm eagerly awaiting Close of Service. The combination of high workload (worse than Swat 'cause I live alone, cook for myself, and there are fewer activities to do to relax) and loneliness is really taking its toll on my optimism. It's not that there's no one to talk to; rather it's just much harder to fully express oneself and vent all the pent up observations, frustrations, and thoughts of the day. I'm actually very lucky when it comes to PCV's. I live in a very posh part of Tanzania. All the tourists pass through this region to go to Mt. Kilimanjaro as well as the big name game parks (i.e. Serengetti and Ngorogoro Crater). Furthermore, about half of the senior government officials (my estimate...) are from this region. My house has fairly consistent electricity and running water and some of my neighbors are very cosmopolitan and well educated people.

Ok! I gotta run for now: time to take boots to the cobbler for yet another round of maintenance! I send my greetings to other profs and any of the juniors and seniors. I hope to visit Swat soon after coming back... Kwa herini. Stefan Gary

I graduated from Swarthmore in 2002 with a dual major in CS and Engineering. Besides the core courses, I've taken all the courses taught by Dr. Maxwell as well as Control Theory and Electronic Circuit Applications. While at Swarthmore, I performed research with Dr. Everbach in biomedical acoustics and with Dr. Maxwell in mobile robotics.

After Swarthmore, I enrolled in graduate school at Purdue University in ECE. I feel that Swarthmore Engineering prepared me well for the rigor and workload of grad school. The most valuable ability that you'll gain from Swarthmore is the ability to learn. You'll find that with this ability coupled with the Swarthmore work ethic, you'll end up at the top of the class whereas you may have been a mediocre student at Swarthmore, like myself. I attended grad school was because of a bad economy and because I didn't feel my education was enough. I'm primarily focusing on computer architecture with interests in related fields such as compilers and VLSI. I was a TA for digital logic design and will be a TA for senior digital design lab and although the syllabus was slightly different than that at Swarthmore, I was able to learn the new material well enough to teach it.

After receiving an MSECE degree in May, I will be joining 300 other programmers at Amazon.com in Seattle. We write the applications that support and further expand the world's largest e-commerce platform. I will work with the Tax Engine group. The group ensures that Amazon can sign on and support third-party merchants to charge proper sales tax, both domestic and international. We also work with other groups such as order management, shipping, and promotions.

I graduated from Swarthmore in 1985 with a B.S. in Engineering and B.A. in Mathematics. This was just at the time computer science and computer engineering were getting started at Swarthmore. I sampled compiler courses with Charles Kelemen, algorithms and summer research with Charles Grinstead, digital logic and architecture with David Bowler, and PDP-11 assembly and my senior design project in computer architecture with Steve Platt. I went to the Computer Science Department at Brown University, and although a lonely hardware engineer within a software/algorithms-focused department, had a great time designing and building a VLSI parallel processor with 470 processing elements to speed biological sequence analysis.

UCSC Computer Engineering was a great fit to my interests in hardware, software, and algorithms, and 1991 was a great time to join. David Haussler was just beginning his meteoric rise in bioinformatics, and working with him led me to understand the real needs of biologists, and to tackle a number of interesting software and hardware problems. This enabled building a next generation parallel processor (Kestrel) far more appropriately suited to its application domain, and also enabled my work on improving efficiency and functionality in our hidden Markov modeling package for biological sequence analysis.

My experience with top-quality undergraduate education and research at Swarthmore, combined with UCSC's emphasis on undergraduates beyond most research universities, made it natural to work with undergraduates on my projects. I've worked with about 40 undergraduates on both computer engineering and bioinformatics research, many of whom have continued on into our graduate programs. Be sure to take advantage of these opportunities while you're at Swarthmore (or at an NSF REU Site), and return the favor if you become a faculty member.

Since joining UCSC, I have had a strong interest in academic program development, in part due to my Swarthmore experience and to being an "involved" graduate student at Brown. I've done extensive work to improve our MS and PhD in Computer Engineering and BS in Computer Engineering programs, and creating the undergraduate BS in Bioinformatics as well as the MS and PhD in Bioinformatics programs. In 2001, I became Chair of the Computer Engineering department. This has been great fun, because it involves working with an excellent group of faculty, students, and staff, and also provides a broader view of education than one gains just as a faculty member. Reflecting back, there are three experiences that really helped me with this (beyond the general assistance that an engineering degree provides to any career). First, having had an excellent undergraduate experience myself, I'm always trying to improve our own programs. Second, my Quaker upbringing and Swarthmore experience has helped me to bring the department to consensus on issues. Third, my frequent games of Dungeons and Dragons, often as group leader, provided both leadership skills and some of the game playing skills necessary to survive in academia.

Richard Hughey '85
rph@soe.ucsc.edu
www.cse.ucsc.edu/~rph

Finished in '52. Sold dynamite for duPont for 3yrs. in Texas and N. Dakota. Went to Episcopal Seminary in Va., finished in '58. Married Louisa Fontaine Washington Dawson same yr. 2 children: Anne is an acupuncturist; Philip just had book on chasing bin Laden published last month: " al Qaeda's Great Escape". He is home with both arms and legs from Iraq on a book tour. His wife, a Serbian lady, continues to consult with the Coptic Church in Egypt by internet. Thinking of building them a house in our front yard to break the habit of chasing terrorists for the last 18 yrs.

I ran a traverse on our land a few yrs. ago. Had forgotten a lot. Closed within a few minutes. S-more gave me a broad view of the world. I now, after doing social work for 18 yrs and retired for 20 yrs, spend time doing non-violent protesting of any and all wars. Have been arrested only 2 x so far. At age 76 there is much left to do. God bless your efforts. John Smucker ps: Anne also went to S-more, finished in Econ. honors.