Aaron Marsh,
'98
After graduating from Swarthmore, I went to work for the Autonomous Underwater
Vehicle (AUV) lab at MIT. While there, I had the distinct pleasure of
spending a couple of years traveling the world, getting seasick, eating greasy
galley food and drinking burnt coffee. And building robot submarines.
Little yellow robot submarines.
In 2000, the AUV Lab spun off a startup company, Bluefin Robotics (http://www.bluefinrobotics.com/). Other than achieving the grand title of 'Software Manager,' nothing really changed. Travel, sea sickness, grease, coffee. Along the way I learned some great practical lessons, developed some job skills, and even practised a little nepotism by hiring 3 Swatties (John Rieffel '99, Nathaniel Fairfield '00, and Gil Jones '01) to be my lackeys.
Finally, 5 years after graduation I decided to do something with my languishing GRE scores, and I enrolled at Stanford for a master's in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. I promised myself I was in it strictly for a year, but found myself easy prey for the sirens' song of academia (and California's weather).
I'm currently taking a years' leave of absence to line up some funding and do a little work here at home for the Icecube Project (http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/). I plan on starting a doctoral program at Stanford Aero/Astro in the fall of 2005.