Physics Alumni

What do some our alumni say about their education at HMC?

Nathan Cook ’95

Nathan Cook graduated from HMC in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. Has his HMC physics degree served him well? When we surveyed him in 1997, he replied

My Mudd education has been indispensable for this job. My attitude towards science has been the single most important strength, and I know that my years at Harvey Mudd contributed positively and greatly to that attitude.

At the time, he was teaching high school physics in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Since then, Nate has

earned a master of education degree from Converse College (1997)
earned a master of science degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2002)
worked as a live fire survivability engineer for the US Air Force, determining the vulnerability of US systems to enemy fire by subjecting them to actual bullets, fragments, and blasts
worked as an outreach engineer, engaging and inspiring students in kindergarten through college to pursue careers in STEM fields
spent a year as a flight test engineer student at the US Air Force Test Pilot School, the only civilian in his class, where he earned a master of science in flight test engineering (2007)

He is currently a US Air Force civilian flight test engineer, heading the F-16 weapons integration team at the 416th Flight Test Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base. The team evaluates military aircraft and hardware, making recommendations to the Air Force on decisions worth billions of taxpayer dollars. In January, he will return to the USAF Test Pilot School as an instructor engineer.

I spoke with Nate before he gave a talk in HMC’s engineering seminar on 13 October 2010.

Physics has absolutely enabled me to do all these different things. Its a great foundation for all sorts of technical fields. If you get an undergraduate degree in aeronautical engineering, thats about all employers think you can do. With a physics degree, it’s much easier go into mechanical engineering, aeronautics, basically any kind of engineering and applied work.

Stan Love ’87

NASA

I credit the solid general physics education I got at HMC for my ability to do good work in such a wide variety of disciplines. That general education has also allowed me to change career paths several times, and to land a good permanent job during a time when the field of my PhD work (astronomy and planetary science) has few positions to offer.

Jan. 1, 1997

Joseph Thywissen ’94

Harvard University

Congratulations on the department’s recent vigorous activity! It sounds great in that it provides more research opportunities for undergraduates….

Jan. 1, 1997

Sean Burke ’82

Sapient Health Network

The scope of my technical education at Harvey Mudd made it possible for me to design products in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and electrical engineering. I felt confident enough to teach myself new subjects… My current team covers a lot of technical ground, and I think that the broad scientific training I received in physics at Harvey Mudd continues to contribute to my ability to successfully educate myself in new subjects and to understand the post-graduate-level work being done by the group.

Jan. 1, 1997

George Conner ’74

Teradyne

It turns out that Physics was a great intro for my particular job. I started as a digital electronics design engineer and the electronics part could be handled with the few courses HMC offered. The tough part was understanding the complex interrelationships of the functional blocks of the system. My physics background helped in this area although I did spend some intensive time reading electronics books. As time progressed, my job became more of an architectural endeavour and that was where physics really started to help: architecture involves understanding the big picture, not just the details of electronics but mechanical, thermal, software etc. At one time or another I have used almost every branch of technology. Only physics gives you enough understanding of theory to let you jump in and start swinging no matter where you land.

Jan. 1, 1997

Eric Fullerton ’84

IBM Almaden Research Center

Regarding the employment opportunities for physicists; I’ve found that physics offers a great deal of flexibility in choosing a career path. When I decided to return to the west coast and join IBM, I was also actively recruited by a teaching college, research university, national lab and I had a tenured position at Argonne if I had chosen to stay there. Presently, the job market is very strong for PhDs.

Jan. 1, 1997

Jason Goldberg ’94

IBM Almaden Research Center

I would say, using myself as an example, having a Physics background is a tremendous asset no matter what field one decides to go into. I really think that the problem solving skills I learned as a Physics major have helped me in my Engineering work. Also, since Physics is so fundamental to everything else (perhaps my view here is a little jaded?) there is no way to go wrong by learning Physics first and then moving up to other disciplines. (‘Up’ in the sense that ‘C’ is a higher level language than ‘assembly’.) And now seems to be a great time for well-skilled scientists here in the Silicon Valley. The group I am in at IBM is concerned with magnetic disk media and most of the PhD’s are from Physics/Material Science backgrounds.

Jan. 1, 1997

Ben Noviello ’84

SRI

I use my physics knowledge to allow me to quickly grasp the underlying principles of whatever problem I am dealing with, allowing me to gain a working knowledge without getting bogged down in the details. It is this ability to be something of a jack-of-all trades (or a technical general practitioner as I prefer to think of it) that makes me valuable to the employer. Physics is the ideal background for this. In fact, as one goes up the management chain of this company, one finds that it is physics-heavy, as these are the people who have the ability to grasp the underlying concepts of a problem- which is what I think physics is all about. Hold the line when it comes to those things that traditionally make HMC great. That I was taught in small classes entirely by English-speaking PhD’s who actually had office hours and didn’t treat us an annoyance stands in stark contrast to the undergraduate experience of most of my peers.

Jan. 1, 1997

Nate Cook ’95

IvyMax

Susan Lewallen ’76

I graduated in physics in 1976, went to medical school and am now an ophthalmologist doing research in tropical eye diseases. HMC was a great education – can’t say I really use a lot of physics, and I’d choke if I had to do a Fourier transformation, but I do rather enjoy optical problems (unlike a lot of my colleagues) and I repair the odd broken instrument…

Jan. 1, 1997

CJ Baumgart ’79

Starstuff

I have had a great life since HMC, I have worked on everything from military to law enforcement to environmental analysis in the Amazon to farming software. I am most proud of my work in remote sensing combined with knowledge-based earth / terrain modeling. This work has led me all over the US, Europe, and South America. The thread of satellite imagery combined with GIS data and then pumped through human rules of expertise has spanned almost all of my projects. I couldn’t have done this at all without a strong background in physics.

Jan. 1, 1997

Brian Baxley ’72

Hughes

I see physics as a “liberal” education in technology. It prepares one to understand much of modern technology, and in the sense that a liberal education prepares one for life but not for a specific role in life, physics gives one access to the world (should I say the universe?) in a general way that goes beyond preparation for research or an academic or industrial career. The physics curriculum develops curiosity, observation, reasoning, mathematical analysis, verbal and written discourse, etc., and these can be applied to writing, teaching, business, engineering, research, diplomacy – to any endeavor.

Jan. 1, 1997

Ken Lorell ’65

Hine design

So what do I think about a physics education some 30+ years after graduation? Would I do it all over again? There’s absolutely no question in my mind. For anyone entering virtually any of the engineering or science disciplines, with maybe the exception of organic chemistry, an undergraduate physics education is invaluable. I went on to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Stanford School of Engineering for my PhD, and my HMC physics degree was a major advantage in practically every class I took and in my thesis research. In addition, in my years as a technical contributor, having the breadth and depth that a physics degree provides made me much more versatile than my colleagues who studied some branch of engineering. I was able to apply basic concepts from E and M, dynamics, optics, and even basic nuclear physics / relativity theory / quantum mechanics to solving problems and inventing new techniques. The ability to understand physical phenomena and apply basic principals to analysis and problem solving is directly related to the solid foundation that I got as a physics major. The colleague with whom I had my most successful collaboration, by the way, has a PhD in physics (with engineering subjects, from the Sorbonne) and my former boss has a degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell—just indications of how a physics degree is a key building block to a successful technical career.

Jan. 1, 1997

Mike Leung ’78

Northrop Grumman

… it has been my experience that the physics background is extremely well suited to the ebbs and flows and constant changes in industry. Perhaps you can use that as a selling point to attract more majors. What I have found with myself and other PhD physicists at Northrop (former TRW), is that we are the most versatile of the many technical disciplines at work. I’ll mention a few skills that the physics major imparts that perhaps aren’t as strong in many engineering majors:

the physicists seem to have better critical thinking skills and quantitative skills
the physicists who were experimentalists in graduate school (or perhaps even during senior research) have a very broad knowledge and can step easily into several disciplines (e.g. I count myself very familiar with materials, vacuum techniques, cryogenic techniques, and influence of measurement equipment on experiments). This broad background is also a key advantage when it comes to troubleshooting and other problem solving
they seem to remember their college subject matters better; believe it or not it comes in handy sometimes. Maybe this comes from the grad school courses, I don’t know

I first entered HMC intending to major in engineering. I switched to Physics because I found the subject matter and approach to teaching much more appealing.

Sept. 1, 2012

Randy Spangler ’92

Foveon

I graduated in 1992 and made a short move to Caltech to study Computation and Neural Systems, a multidisciplinary degree which covers everything from information theory to computer graphics to neural networks to measuring the behavior of individual neurons in rats. The core curriculum of Mudd was great preparation for this, giving me a broad enough background to do well across all of that. I finished my PhD in 1999, with a thesis titled “Real-Time Rule-Based Analysis and Generation of Music” — which also leveraged the music courses I took at Scripps.

I then moved up to Silicon Valley and worked for 6 years at Foveon, an image sensor / digital camera startup, where I wrote software and firmware for digital cameras. With a physics degree, I understood not only the software, but also the semiconductor physics and optics that happen before the image is captured, and I was comfortable enough with an oscilloscope to do hardware debugging as well. That flexibility is particularly important at a startup, where there are few enough engineers that everyone need to be good at several things.

After Foveon, I worked a year and a half at Carrier IQ, a startup which does cell phone-based diagnostics and analysis of Sprint’s mobile phone network. All those E&M courses helped me understand how CDMA and GSM work, so I could determine what types of information would be most useful to read from phones.

In 2007 I started at Google, where I’ve now been for 5 years. I’ve worked on Google Earth, written Python-based build systems, and for the last 3 years I’ve been the firmware lead for Chrome OS, Google’s new open-source browser-based operating system. And yes, I still have an oscilloscope at my desk.

In the 20 years since graduating with a physics degree from Mudd, I’ve been unemployed, well, never. I’ve also never had a job title of “physicist” or “scientist” — but every physics course I took at Mudd has been useful at one time or another.

Sept. 1, 2012

George Conner ’74

Teradyne

Jan. 1, 1997