I went to school at Harvey Mudd College. Mudd's a pretty wild place. I did all sorts of things, many of which I probably shouldn't mention here. Two things that I can tell you about are juggling and unicycling, which you can learn more about in my Useless Skills. Here's a picture of South Dorm, which is where I lived and learned during my stay at Mudd.

On the academic side, I majored in engineering, which involved lots of classes doing small projects involving bread boards and chips and capacitors and whatnot. I also had two large scale projects in the form of Engineering Clinics. My junior year, I worked on a project for Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), involving modifying their satellite development testbed to use fiber optic wires for communication between different modules rather than coax cable. My senior year, I moved up to the role of project leader on a project again involving fiber optics, this time for Lockheed Aircraft. Since these were both pretty interesting projects, I think I'll tell you a little more about both of them and my role in both projects.

JPL, as part of their program to develop lower cost spacecraft (Mars Pathfinder may have come out of that), have a testbed where they develop and test individual components of their upcoming vehicles. The testbed involves both actual components and computer simulations of components, connected over a coaxial network, as they would be on the spacecraft itself. In anticipation of converting to a fiber optic network on the spacecraft themselves, JPL asked a Clinic team, of which I was a member, to modify the coax connection used for the simulated components and build a fiber optic network to allow the components to communicate with each other. My role in this project was to develop the network. To that end, I researched fiber optic networks and specified the components, including both the transmitters and receivers (which were integrated into circuit boards and then connected to the computer hardware by other members of the team) and the network itself, including the cables and the coupler for connecting multiple components.

Lockheed Aircraft developed a prototype system for transmitting video signals across a fiber optic connection for applications on airplanes. My Clinic project senior year had two major goals. First, to modify Lockheed's existing circuit design to multiplex multiple signals for transmission across a single fiber optic cable, and second, to lay out a prototype circuit board to test and evaluate the design. As the team leader, I was responsible for major design decisions, functioning as the liaison between Lockheed and my team members at Harvey Mudd, and planning and executing the project.