What is your next adventure? 

After graduation I will be going to Chicago and starting a full-time job at the Chicago Trading Company as a quantitative trading analyst. It's a shift from aerospace, but I really enjoy math and playing around with math problems and numbers, so I'm looking forward to starting there later this year. 

What about your next adventure are you most looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to doing something new. I've been studying aerospace for the past four years, so it will be a bit of a change going from being a full-time engineering student to working in a new city, new industry, and new company so it's all really exciting for me.

Did you have any previous co-op, internship, or research experience in this area?

I interned with the Chicago Trading Company last summer as a quantitative trading analyst intern and that's how I found that I really wanted to keep pursing this type of work after graduation. 

I did undergraduate research my freshman and sophomore year in the Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) and last semester I did research with Dr. John Dec. During my first semester with ASDL I worked on model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and my second semester I used Dassault Systems 3D to model an aircraft wing using their platform, which integrates various software and provides solutions and visualizations. My research with Dr. Dec looked into the viability of aero capture for orbital insertion around Titan, so we would utilize aerodynamic drag to slow down a vehicle's speed into a more optimal speed. 

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

The courses in aerospace are so varied that you inevitably have to learn things that maybe don't click straight away or maybe it's a subject you aren't particularly interested in, but as an engineer you learn the discipline of pushing through and getting to the end goal which I found really valuable to reach my own.

Professor P.K. Yeung has been instrumental in my time here at Tech. I really enjoyed how he taught aerodynamics and the mathematical rigor that he expected of his students. Through that rigor and mentorship, he helped me take AE classes that were statistics-based which actually overlaps well when understanding turbulence as well as the stock market.

What advice would you give to an underclassman who would like to follow the same path?

Go with the flow and try not to stress over what's coming next. At the end of the day, what you're learning will be applicable in many fields and in many areas of life, so you don't have to worry if this is the exact direction for you. You can adapt and work with the resources around you to figure out where you should go next.