After graduation, what's your next adventure?

I’m joining GE Global Research in Niskiyuna, New York. I’ll be a research engineer doing probabilistic design and risk analysis.

What about your next adventure are you most excited about?

Personally, speaking, my wife and I love traveling. We’ve never been to the northeast, so we’re excited. Professionally speaking I am waiting to apply my research to real problems and see the impact. The major difference between an industrial setting and academic research is that, in industry everything is limited by time and money, so you don’t have quite as much time for high-level inquiry. I spent almost two-thirds of my last internship just reviewing the data we’d collected from different sources to see what to extract. It’s only after that’s done that we can do statistical analysis. So it’s nice to see how industry and academics can combine to solve a problem.

Did you have any previous co-op internship or research experience that helped you get to this point?

I did my graduate research at ASDL focused on design methods. I did an internship at Airbus in the United Kingdom, applying probabilistic design methods to aircraft design. PDM looks at information based on parameters that are not under our control.  It gives us insight on things like the cost of fuel, manufacturing costs and climate.

How did your educational experience at Georgia Tech help you achieve your goal?

Georgia Tech and ASDL have given me enough freedom to take different classes to see different approaches – computer science, machine learning, industrial systems design. That got me out of my comfort zone and helped me solve design problems that I wouldn’t have been able to tackle. Tech also exposed me to multiple industry leaders – Boeing, Airbus, NASA- which allowed me to see the diversity of design challenges.

What advice would you give a student who was thinking about following your steps at Georgia Tech's aerospace engineering school?

The doctoral degree is a waypoint – not the finish. A lot of time can be wasted in grad school searching for that one big idea. People come here, sometimes, to get that Nobel prize for their research. That seldom happens, but the time you waste looking for that one idea is unnecessary. The Georgia Tech AE School is a platform where you can do a great many things, so don’t just focus on one idea. Allow yourself to diversify your knowledge and your research.