Alumni Newsletter
Winter 2017
Website Refresh
Table of Contents What’s New New FinTech Concentration Page 4 New AR/VR Lab Opened Page 4 Current Class Profile Page 5 Alumni Highlights Tony Chang ‘12 Page 6 Dayana Hijaz ‘15 Page 7 Leela Tanikella ‘15 Page 12 Megan McClarty ‘16 Page 13 Fu-Chi Shih ‘17 Page 16 Fung Fellowship Updates from the Fung Fellowship Page 10-11 Career Round Up Annual Alumni Brunch Page 8-9 Annual Employer Breakfast Page 8-9 Paris Happy Hour Page 8-9 Winter Spotlight Recap What you missed from this year’s festive event Page 10-11 Upcoming Events Save the Date for Spring alumni events Page 17
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We've refreshed our website! Did you notice? Check out our new look at meng.berkeley.edu.
table of contents
Design Ashley Villanueva Content Maya Rector, Caroline Osterman Photography James Wang, Adriel Olmos copy Editors Julie McShane, Beth Leven
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winter 2017
Editorial Team
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The new Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) lab in Blum Hall has students and faculty alike excited about the possibilities that lie ahead given the emergence of AR/VR as an up-and-coming field within the engineering industry. We spoke with Dr. Allen Yang, Chief Scientist of the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership and the Executive Director of the Center of Augmented Cognition, who took part in making the lab a reality.
What’s new
MEng Full-Time Class of 2018 Profile Number of Applicants: 2,034 Class Size: 366 Mean GRE: 91% Q, 70% V, 50% A Mean GPA: 3.7 Mean Age: 23 74% International citizens 13% California residents 33% Women Departments: 28% ME, 24% IEOR, 21% EECS, 10% BIOE, 6% CEE,6% MSE, 5% NE 43% received a MEng program grant or fellowship Academics 180 undergraduate schools represented. Most predominant are Purdue, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Zhejiang University. 31 Countries are represented. Most predominant are China, USA, India, France, Taiwan, Singapore and Canada. 6% hold master’s degrees A number are recipients of distinguished fellowships and grants, including MasterCard Foundation scholars and GEM Fellows.
What’s New
MEng Alum Han Jin Named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30
Read more about the new AR/VR lab »
New FinTech Concentration For Master Of Engineering Students
Read more about Han’s recognition »
Read more about the new FinTech concentration »
Congratulations to MEng IEOR ’12 alum Han Jin for being named in Forbes’ 2018 “30 Under 30†in Consumer Technology! Han is co-founder and CEO of Lucid, the creators of the first consumer “VR180 3D†camera. Their device is easy-to-use and as small as a smartphone, with the power to capture 4K , 3-dimensional video. The 180° camera captures a full peripheral field of vision while filming in 3D adds depth and realism to the content — revolutionizing the way we capture and view augmented/virtual reality. (The LucidCam is available at Amazon and LucidCam.com.)
Berkeley MEng Class of 2018 Profile
The UC Berkeley Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership has just announced a new concentration for IEOR Master of Engineering students focused on Financial Technology (FinTech). The concentration will help meet the large and growing demand for FinTech workers in banking, consulting, and technology companies. The FinTech concentration equips students with skills in machine learning and data analytics with an emphasis on financial time-series analysis. The FinTech concentration is similar to the Decision Analytics concentration in that it equips students with a broad set of widely-applicable skills in data analytics, but different because it places special emphasis on emerging technologies in the financial industry.
The Fung Institute for Institutional Leadership welcomes its largest class of MEng students yet.
Blum Hall opens state-of- the-art AR/VR lab
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Each year the Berkeley MEng program admits students from around the world who go on to become leaders in their respective fields. With 31 countries represented in the class of 2018, the Fung Institute offers an extremely diverse student body of prospective engineers who come from many different backgrounds and perspectives. As a result of their time spent in the MEng program, Berkeley MEng students are given the tools they need through effective technical training and leadership development skills in order to become the innovators of tomorrow.
alumni highlight
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Read more about Dayana »
Dayana Hijaz, Class of 2015
Alumni highlight
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Dayana graduated in 2015 with an MEng degree in Mechanical Engineering and a concentration in Product Design. She is passionate about sustainable transportation and energy, and she stresses the importance of self-empowerment as a woman in STEM.
What did you do after graduation? I spent a couple of weeks with my family then started my first job as a PV Designer II at SolarCity where I designed precise layouts for rooftop photovoltaic systems and performed structural and electrical analysis. What are you currently working on? I am currently working at Tesla with an awesome team, developing software tools that aim to automate the engineering and sales designs of multiple energy products, including Solar Roof, PowerWall, EV Charging, and PV Solar. What have you found most rewarding about the work you’re currently doing? The most rewarding aspect of my job is the fact that I am consistently challenged. I am forced to grow beyond my current abilities or knowledge, which makes me feel that the person I am today is better, stronger and smarter than the person I was yesterday. To add to that, I am proud to be part of a movement that is on the bleeding edge of revolutionizing the world’s access to sustainable transportation and energy. Do you have a fun fact about yourself that you’d like to share? I sometimes watch Wonder Woman trailers just to get amped up. ​
Tony Chang, Class of 2012
Read more about Tony »
Tony graduated in 2012 with his MEng degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS). He is currently a senior product manager at Intuit, where he works on expanding the developer platform and connected app ecosystem. Tony attributes his resilience and confidence when it comes to solving problems and working with others to his time spent at the Fung Institute.
What did you do after graduation? I went back to Australia for one last vacation to see my family and friends before diving full time into work in the Bay Area as a Software Engineer. What are you currently working on? I’m now a Product Manager at Intuit working on expanding our developer platform and connected app ecosystem to help small business owners work more efficiently. What have you found most rewarding about the work you’re currently doing? The most rewarding thing about my current work is the privilege of seeing first hand how the software I create with my team can mean so much to small business owners who are pursuing their passions and crafting the life they want. What starts as an intellectual exercise of transforming customer and data driven insights into designs and working software becomes an emotional achievement when a customer is telling you she can now spend half an hour more each day with her family because of the work you helped reduce. Do you have a fun fact about yourself that you’d like to share? When I first arrived in Berkeley (which was also the first time being in the US), I was unable to order the right drink from the Shattuck Avenue Starbucks because of my Australian accent. Less than a year later, my friends back home were teasing that I had ‘changed’ and they couldn’t understand my apparently thick American accent. Nowadays, my work colleagues have guessed incorrectly that I’m from places like the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, Hong Kong or even just the East Coast!
▲Career Chat On September 22, 2017 MEng alums Brian Mick (ME ‘15, Tesla) and Portia Chan (IEOR ‘15, Data Analyst, Customer Marketing Group) returned to provide exclusive tips and tricks for current MEng students to best prepare for their technical interview.
Read more about the breakfast »
UC Berkeley’s MEng program had a major turnout of both alumni and current students at its 6th Annual Alumni Brunch at the Fung Institute, with 90 alumni who attended and 200 current students who attended the event. Of the alumni who attended, 16 work for Apple, 11 work for Tesla, and 3 have founded their own companies. Given that many Berkeley MEng alumni work at some of the most desirable companies in their respective fields, current students flocked to learn advice from alumni, who had been in their shoes not too long ago. For instance, Anderson Shyu, Class of 2018, expressed, With over 85 of the alumni in attendance indicating that their companies were hiring, the event acted as a way for both alumni and current students to network and build connections across engineering fields. The event was helpful for many current students who attended, and Nigel Mevana, Class of 2018, mentioned, “This event is a great way to learn about what alumni do and where they work on a daily basis, which helps to get an idea of what’s ahead for us as current students.†All in all, Berkeley MEng’s 6th Annual Alumni Brunch was an event full of networking opportunities, advice for current students, and rekindled friendships (as well as countless bottles of champagne).
career round up
â–²Employer Breakfast On September 13, 2017 we hosted an exclusive employer breakfast before the campus-wide career fair, where our grad students get a chance to network with recruiters from some of the best companies in the Bay Area. This year, 120 students and 41 representatives from 17 companies attended, including General Motors, Hilti, BD Biosciences, Chevron, Ford Motor, Lucid Software, and VISA.
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Career Round Up
Read more about the brunch »
▼ Alumni Office Hours On November 9, 2017 Ani Subbarao, of Medallia, IEOR ‘12, shared how his career has progressed 4+ years after the MEng program. Ani Subbarao is currently a Senior Manager at Medallia in their London office.
Career round up
“This event is a great opportunity to see what life will be like after graduation and to start preparing for the future.â€
The Career Development team had a robust schedule of events and workshops take place for current MEng students this semester with the help of our generous alumni network and partners. If you are interested in volunteering your time, please contact Julie McShane, jmcshane@berkeley.edu. 9/8/2017 | Career Chat - Behavioral Interview Skills 9/10/2017 | Alumni Brunch 9/13/2017 | Employer Breakfast 9/15/2017 | Career Chat/Case Interview Workshop with Kevin Danser from PwC 9/22/2017 | Career Chat: Tackling the Technical Interview with Brian Mick ME ‘15 and Portia Chan IEOR ‘15 10/6/17 | Career Chat: BCG Gamma Group 10/13/17 | Career Chat: Fehr & Peers 10/26/2017 | Alumni Office Hour: Ankit Dutta, Prosper, IEOR ‘17 11/9/2017 | Alumni Office Hour: Ani S, Medallia, IEOR 2012 11/30/2017 | Tech Talk & Recruiting Info Session with J.P. Morgan Event
▲Berkeley MEng’s 6th Alumni Brunch engages over 300 current students and alumni
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â–¼Alumni Happy Hour in Paris On October 12, 2017, MEng alumni in the Paris area gathered to catch up!
The Fung Fellowship was launched in Fall 2016 as a collaboration between Berkeley's School of Public Health and College of Engineering for undergraduates looking to disrupt the health + tech space.
With Coleman Fung’s vision for revolutionizing undergraduate education, the Fung Fellowship for Wellness and Technology Innovation launched in fall of 2016, in collaboration with the School of Public Health and College of Engineering. The Fellowship program offers a sustained health + tech experience with students working in interdisciplinary teams alongside community and industry partners to design breakthrough technology solutions to society’s most pressing health and wellness challenges. Fung Fellows are a competitively selected group of nearly 50 UC Berkeley undergraduates who work with us over two years to learn skills in leadership, technology, design, and public health. We are well into the second year of the program and at the beginning of this past semester we kicked-off our first 30-week-long Venture Lab. This year’s Venture Lab structure is uniquely designed to create a sustained real-world experience that includes partnerships with outside organizations, meaningful engagement with customer groups, an iterative design process, and opportunities for technical and professional growth as Fellows lead their own projects. This year’s projects have the students exploring how emerging technology solutions can address complex challenges for the youngest and oldest people in our society, from attention disorders in young children to cognitive decline in older adults. This first semester the Fellows focused on customer engagement and identifying the needs of their target customer to better refine the solution they will ultimately develop. Focusing on the people as much as the technology is often more important because our human-centered design approach emphasizes starting the product development process by deeply understanding the needs of people.
Fung Fellowship
Health + Tech + Impact. Shaping the next generation of leaders to transform health and wellness for kids and older adults
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What is the Fung Fellowship?
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Updates from the Fung Fellowship
To learn more about the Fung Fellowship for Wellness & Technology Innovations, visit fungfellows.berkeley.edu. We are currently accepting applications for our next cohort of undergraduate students.
Founding Principles: Diversity: We seek diversity in our Fellows to spark new insights and innovations. Student Engagement: Extending beyond the typical flipped classroom structure, our Fellows co-design the Fellowship experience. Collaboration: Fellows learn, grow, and work as members of teams. Real World Experience: Fellows address public health challenges and tech projects that are of importance to our community and industry partners.
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Megan graduated in 2016 with an MEng degree in Material Science. She currently works at Lam Research as a data engineer, where her and her team are currently building data visualization tools that will help engineers and analysts quickly export metrology data.
Megan McClarty, Class of 2016
What did you do after graduation? I took a job as a Semiconductor Process Engineer in a rotational program at Lam Research and moved to Portland, Oregon, to start working at a customer site. After six months, I was transferred back to the Bay Area and am currently working as a Data Engineer. What are you currently working on? Our team is building internal data visualization tools for integration with a Hadoop framework, allowing engineers and analysts to quickly retrieve, trend and export relevant process and metrology data. My job mostly consists of pipeline optimization and UI development. What have you found most rewarding about the work you’re currently doing? I’m gratified to be part of a program and company that has allowed me to explore different areas I’m interested in. I started off working almost entirely in the field and the lab; after working a bit on UI development for a side project, I expressed my desire to work more on the analytics and data engineering side. Not only did the company approve this request, they also provided me with the opportunity to take courses in Spark and Python to hasten my development. It’s been an incredibly educational year, and being part of the data engineering team is exciting, because it is a relatively nascent initiative in the context of the company. What’s a fun fact about yourself? I recently bought an ex-racehorse named Bitcoin! An even less stable investment than actual bitcoin.
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Leela Tanikella, Class of 2015
Leela graduated with her MEng degree in Bioengineering in 2015. She currently works at Intuitive Surgical, where she is a Design Controls engineer.
Read more about Megan »
What did you do after graduation? After graduation, I took some time off to unwind from the year and dove straight into work! I had a job offer in the works before I graduated, so thankfully, I was able to spend my week off without having to stress out. If anything, I would advise current students to take off more than a week before beginning full-time employment! What are you currently working on? Currently, I work as a Design Controls engineer at Intuitive Surgical (ISI). At ISI, we design surgical consoles to enable robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery. My job as a Design Controls engineer is to create and maintain design controls documentation, thus ensuring that the medical devices produced by Intuitive Surgical meet and exceed the standards set by the FDA. I utilize my knowledge of Risk management, design controls and ISI operating procedures to ensure that devices are compliant with the official standards. What have you found most rewarding about the work you’re currently doing? Easily my favorite part of working for Intuitive is the impact of what we do. Through the daVinci system, we get to save people’s lives every day! That is also reflected in the drive to prioritize patient safety at ISI. Our focus is to always put patients first — at the end of the day, it all comes down to improving the patients’ quality of life.
Read more about Leela »
Fung Fellowship Most Innovative Exposition award: Cuddle Cub team
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MEng Most Innovative Exposition award: Data Fusion Analytics team
Over 300 people attended the Fung Institute Winter Spotlight on December 5th, 2017, including 160 general admission attendees and 115 current MEng student attendees. Additionally, 42 Fung Fellowship students and 24 alumni attended the event that was co-hosted by the Fung Fellowship Program.
Fung Institute Winter Spotlight draws in 300+ attendees to celebrate student tech innovation
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winter spotlight
The night began with a cheerful foreword from CEO and co-founder of the Blue Goji Corporation, Coleman Fung. The Hearst Memorial Mining building was already buzzing with excitement as both Berkeley MEng capstone teams and Fung Fellowship students demonstrated their projects. With interactive displays, engaging games, and informational demonstrations, each group that participated had the opportunity to show off what they’ve been diligently working on throughout the semester. Since capstone projects will not be completed until the end of the 2018 spring semester, teams were able to offer their professors, peers, and the general public a sneak peek of what is yet to come. Min Kim, a student working on the self driving E-bike team, explained that his team is primarily working on “creating bikes that drive themselves so that no manual balancing is necessary, which we are hoping can be utilized in the city’s future bike sharing programs.†Min’s group featured a mini E-bike prototype display to demonstrate how they plan to use the prototype’s design towards creating their full-sized bike design next spring. While all capstone projects had a technical engineering basis, Luna Izpiusa’s group, Digital Arts Engagement Platform, was working on blending the technical aspects of engineering with the arts in order to increase community art engagement through the use of IoT devices and a mobile app. Luna explained that her favorite part of her team’s project is “working with a blend of artists and engineers to think about how we can build this and think outside the box.†Many capstone teams were also focused on creating projects that would have an impact in the healthcare field. For example, MEng student Han Lee explained that his group’s project aims to “make radioisotopes for radiation therapy for cancer patients, which would allow hospitals to use the design in house instead of purchasing radioisotopes elsewhere.†Additionally, student Jose Ramirez’s group is working with the Million Hands organization to create customized low-cost prosthetic hands for children by utilizing 3D-printing. These are just several of the many examples of how Berkeley MEng capstone project teams are utilizing cutting edge technology in order to solve real world problems that aim to improve the lives of both individuals and communities as a whole. 
 The atmosphere was one of excitement and festivity as the audience sipped on hot cocoa beneath Christmas lights while they wandered from one display to the next. Eventually, the festivities came to a close once the Most Innovative Exposition awards had been given out. These awards were given to the Berkeley MEng Data Fusion Analytics team and the Fung Fellowship Cuddle Cub team by the Fung Alumni panel who attended the event as judges, and scored teams throughout the night based on the creativity of their innovations and displays. As the night ended teams began to pack away their displays while attendees headed home, after a festive winter night of innovative tech and problem-solving design from today’s Berkeley MEng students and tomorrow’s engineering leaders.
MEng team: Harvesting temperature gradients in buildings for non-intermittent IoT powering
Spring Capstone Showcase Week of April 30-May 4* *Date, time, and location to be determined.
Alumni Happy Hour Friday, March 9, 2018 Time: 6:30-9:30pm Location: To be determined
Fu-Chi Shih recently graduated in the spring of 2017 with an MEng degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR). She currently works as a customer and product analyst at Adobe where she utilizes data analytics from customer usage in order to improve products.
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Fu-Chi Shih, Class of 2017
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Read more about Fu-Chi »
What did you do after graduation? I had a two-month vacation with my family and then joined Adobe in early July of 2017. What are you currently working on? I am working as a Customer and Product Analyst at Adobe. In this position, I utilize data analytics tools and methods to analyze customer profile and usage data in order to help Adobe’s product team improve products. What have you found most rewarding about the work you’re currently doing? I can drive direct impacts on the organizations and products I am working with. It gives me significant satisfaction when deriving insights from analyzing data and helping others to make more informed decisions. Do you have any advice for being a woman in the field, and has that affected you at all (positively or negatively)? Keep pushing yourself and step out of your comfort zone. This belief helped me switch my career path to what I really enjoy. I believe that when there is a will, there is a way. You just need to trust in something and listen to your heart. Do you have any advice for being a woman in the field, and has that affected you at all (positively or negatively)? Keep pushing yourself and step out of your comfort zone. This belief helped me switch my career path to what I really enjoy. I believe that when there is a will, there is a way. You just need to trust in something and listen to your heart. What’s a fun fact about yourself? I like cooking as well as working out. The two things I miss the most in Berkeley are living in the UC Village (great kitchen) and taking the Core Blast class in RSF. That class is really awesome — perfect way to relieve your stress while job hunting!
Spring 2018 MEng Alumni Events - Save the Date!
College of Engineering Graduation Tuesday, May 15, 2018 Time: 9-11am Location: Greek Theatre
The Big Give: Day of Giving Thursday, March 8, 2018 Time: All day! funginstitute.berkeley.edu/give
upcoming events
