Here are some quick words of advice that may or may not be helpful in the pursuit of your goals:

• Do all your homework, it makes everything easier.
• Work on things that matter, and use your powers for good.
• Design without ego: it doesn't matter whose idea it is, your team should always make decisions based on what's best for the goal.
• The path is not direct.
• Allow inspiration from unexpected places.
• Be a T-type of person: have depth in certain areas so you can be relied on to accomplish things, and have breadth to understand and have empathy for your neighboring disciplines (thanks IDEO).
• Also, make time to be social: working with other people is a crucial part of building strong teams to solve hard problems, knowing how to get along with different types of people is really important. This may conflict with the first statement above, that is okay.
• Relationships matter and play a much bigger role than you might expect in achieving engineering goals -- this includes not only working with your team, but also your vendors and even the great people sweeping the floor.
• You should never be above picking up a broom and sweeping the floor, take responsibility, and do whatever needs to get done, never mind the glory of it, it all needs to get done.

Questions from a High School Senior (2017)

Biomechatronic systems are hard, and we've still got a long way to go before we can perform better than biology. The issues are both on mechanical and the electrical and controls side. Mammal muscle is very impressive, and the ability to be both strong and delicate is extremely difficult to replicate. We try to do this with "force-control" but we usually take a hit to bandwidth when we try to push some softness in our devices, but when we try to have high bandwidth (ability to be powerful with speed and force) our systems tend to be stiff. So that drives us to want variable stiffness. But all of this means we're adding more hardware to the problem. That's heavy. And weight is a bummer from both a user point of view (imagine wearing an anchor for a leg), and an energy efficiency point of view, because the more mass you have distally the more power it takes to move it, and hence energy consumption. In wearable devices, such as robotic prosthetics, more energy consumption means we need more batteries, which add weight, again increasing energy consumption by the robot as well as the user. Also, added weight is harder for the user to wear, so that's also a bummer.

So, power density is the biggest issue from the electro-mechanical side.

Then there's control. How does the autonomous powered prosthesis (ie robotic prosthetic leg) know what to do, when the user can't tell it what to do with their nervous system. Gait detection, is a tough problem. We want the human in the loop, so in our group we're developing new ways to interface with the user's nervous system, so we can take direct neural signals and let the robot sense and communicate back along those biological wires.

10-15 years out? Tough to say, but I think the neural interface will be working to a reasonable amount of fidelity. You probably won't feel someone touching your foot, but you can tell when your foot is touching uneven terrain and how much force you're applying, enough to have sufficient control of walking and stability. I think we'll have way better batteries, allowing us to better utilize electromagnetic actuators. I hope someone comes up with some sort of ground-breaking actuator technology though, because magnetics have been around a long time and have only be incrementally improving.

Take apart everything you can get your hands on, and see how other things are designed and fabricated. Get summer internships while you're in college, always surround yourself with more experienced people. Hangout with the old dudes in the shop. When it comes to mechanical design it's all about experience. You can't learn it all from a book, you have to do it, screw up, and do it again. Learn to draw. I hand sketch on paper everything I design before I put it on the computer. It's much faster and lets me explore the design space more rapidly. finally, when I design in CAD I use a master modeling approach. They don't teach it in school, but it's extremely powerful. below are a couple links of a design thing I wrote up a while ago and a video someone made of a lecture thing I did about master modeling. no promise they're great, but maybe they're helpful.

• mechanical design thingy I wrote up
• Master Modeling video

I actually first when to NYU and double majored CS and ME for my first two years...until I realized how much debt I was accruing and that I didn't like that i wasn't a hands-on school. I took a semester off, and then transfered to calpoly. CalPoly was fantastic as a hands-on school, people coming out of there really know how to do things because every class has a lab. I highly recommend it. I of course always wanted to go to MIT and I never thought I was good enough. So I figured Berkeley would be great because mostly, it was my local school. I applied to UCB 4 times, only was accepted on the last try. I applied in high school, as a transfer student, and twice for grad school. I worked for two years at a biomedical company. Finally I talked my way in by speaking directly to professors. I then worked for 6 years after getting a masters at UCB, and ended up finally deciding to go to MIT because I had a bunch of bosses that went there, and I felt like I could work as hard as them, and if the boss went to MIT, then maybe if I go to MIT I too could be a creative director someday. The verdict is still out on that one. Also, of course, I've wanted to be an engineer since i was a child, I didn't know it was engineering, but turns out that's what it was, and MIT was the ultimate place to do it.

To be honest, though, MIT undergrad is really brutal. They pound the students into the ground. I'm happy I went to CP and spent time going to the beach, mountain biking, hiking, and going to parties. I developed social skills that a lot of MIT kids don't learn. I think CP students have strong skills, but also some humility -- and that makes them good collaborators. So, for me, I think having a life as an undergrad was really valuable from a social context, while still developing really strong hands-on, real-world, commonsense skills. Now, coming to MIT as a grad student, after having worked a while is turning out to be powerful, because I learned how to get along with people and collaborate, something that is surprisingly difficult to come by at some of these super fancy schools - from my perspective.

Yeah, don't worry about the money, it will come (I keep telling myself that anyway), more important is having fun with your work. I've always decided the next step by asking myself: "what's the coolest project I can work on? and, what skills am I going to pick up doing that project?" Honestly, my first three years at MIT were not particularly inspiring for me, I didn't like the work and it kinda felt like a waste - I wasn't learning the skills I wanted to learn, and I didn't believe in the work, where as everything I had done before then I was getting wins from my work. That said, some of my masters work was interesting, just the way we approached it didn't let me dig in the way I prefer. When I approach a problem I want to try to solve it, for real, not just build something to tell a story about. That said, looking back, I did actually learn a lot about the underlying basis of optimization algorithms, getting under the hood of microcontrollers, prototyping circuit boards, etc. Now, that I switched over to Biomechatronics (I switched a year ago [written in 2017]), I'm, again, super stoked. This is by far the coolest thing I could be doing, so that's the most important check box. And, I'm incrementally learning, I'm doing mostly things I'm good at, but I'm able to apply them at a high level, and that's really satisfying, while incrementally improving. It's a huge win in my book. Also, it gives me room to poke around a little at other side interests.

I also, think it's important to have both focus as well as wide interests. It's good to have interest or at least empathy for alternative fields. You never know where inspiration may come from, so you need to be open to accepting that it might come from unexpected places.