I've felt for quite some time that an HMC physics major can do anything he or she wants. The mere fact of making it through the program attests to a certain amount of natural ability, but at least as important is the fact that much of what we learn is many methods of approaching problems. The flexibility and open-mindedness which results is of great value in (I believe) any career option, from physics to software engineering to investment banking. So, though physics doesn't apply directly to writing software, the training I got has helped indirectly in a great many ways, most of which I don't realize until I stop and think about it for a bit.

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 Ph.D. 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.

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.

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.