Every year NASA holds a competition to write the most inspiring tweet to the Voyager 1 probe. For the price of a mere 60 characters, NASA beams someone’s message into outer space at 2.1 GHz where the 3.7 m diameter dish antenna of the Voyager 1 probe captures it, stores it in memory, and promptly overwrites it with new data. However, for a brief moment those 60 bytes are part of the most distant human-made object ever. In 2016, I wasn’t quite eloquent enough to have my missive sent the nearly 10 billion miles to Voyager 1, but the thought was awe-inspiring.

In 2016, I was also sitting in a plush office chair, behind a white IKEA standing desk, refactoring the last lines of code of what was another internet pop-up ad. After graduating from UPenn in 2012 with a degree in economics, I briefly worked as a paralegal before finding my way into software. I worked at an ad tech startup building comparison shopping ads for online travel agencies like Expedia, Kayak, and Priceline. Eventually, I longed to build something that didn't disappear when I closed my laptop at the end of the day.

Months after first learning about the NASA Twitter competition I quit my job and left New York. I was going to become an electrical engineer so that someday I might have the opportunity to work on something as meaningful as the Voyager probes.

After numerous phone calls with academic advisors at schools across the country, the encouraging words of Brenda Larson in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department convinced me that the University of Washington was where I should be. I packed my life into a Hyundai Santa Fe and drove from New York to Seattle. I took refresher courses in math and physics at North Seattle Community College. I studied for and took the GRE. I applied to the MSEE program at UW. I also acquired my amateur radio license. I may not have been able to make contact with the Voyager probes, but I have been able to wax poetic through the FM repeaters of the AO-85 and SO-50 satellites.

Leaving my job and friends in New York was daunting. I had no background in electrical engineering and it had been years since I had taken calculus and physics. I had never been to Seattle and had no friends or family there. By pursuing electrical engineering I wasn’t merely changing careers, I was starting over entirely.

The day I was accepted into the MSEE program at UW marked the culmination of a year and a half's work. I had fulfilled the program prerequisites and continued to take classes as a non-matriculated student. All the while, I was working part time as a software engineer to cover tuition costs. My first day as a Master's student marked almost two years since I left New York. In those two years and the year following I built and learned more than I ever imagined I would. I successfully built an audio mixer in EE 233, a DC voltage doubler in EE 331, a discrete component op-amp in EE 332, a high resolution pressure sensing circuit in EE 433, and a 2 GHz Yagi antenna in EE 464.

But with success comes failure. In EE 420, I attempted but failed to implement a system to determine inter-satellite distances using OFDM signals. In EE 529, I also failed to implement a model to show how resonant tunnelling can increase the efficiency of superconducting LEDs.

Something I didn't expect to build when I was first accepted into the Master's program, though, was teaching experience. I was a teaching assistant nearly every quarter during my Master's program and was a co-instructor my last quarter:

• CSE 154 (Co-Instructor; Spring '20)
• EE 420 (TA; Winter & Spring '20)
• CSE 154 (TA; Fall '19)
• EE 331 (TA; Spring '19)
• ENGR 105 (TA; Winter '19)
• CSE 154 (TA: Fall '18)

Teaching was a rewarding but challening experience. It forced me to think about problems and concepts in new ways and explain them in still other ways. Being a teaching assistant and co-instructor helped me to solidify concepts from my coursework and to further develop my technical communication skills. However, being a co-instructor for CSE 154 was especially meaningful in that it allowed me to give back to a community that gave me the means to pursue this crazy dream of being an electrical engineer in the first place.

Along the way to getting my MSEE, I was fortunate enough to have some truly unique experiences. In the summer of 2018, I lived every space nerd’s dream (including this one's) and interned at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. During my internship, I assisted with the calibration of the cameras for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around the asteroid Bennu, having successfully collected a sample from its surface.

While at Goddard, I was able to tour the mission operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope as well as learn about numerous other missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the Parker Solar Probe. I even had the opportunity to meet the NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, twice!

Following up on that experience, in January 2019, my team, Vulture Avionics, won the inaugural International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at UW. As a result, I was awarded an interview with a local space technology company called RBC Signals, which applies the sharing-economy model to satellite communications. This model allows entities to buy uplink and downlink communication time from a network of ground stations (antennas) negating the need for them to purchase, install, and maintain their own. In the summer of 2019, I interned at RBC Signals helping to automate the scheduling of ground station use. I was also lucky enough during my internship to get to tour the SeaTel factory and learn firsthand how to install and operate an X band antenna.

After graduating in the summer of 2020, I was hired as a hardware engineer at ThruWave Inc. I am and always will be extremely grateful to have had the means to pursue this wild dream and a network of friends and family to support and encourage me along the way. In particular, I would like to thank the following people: