Mia
Rath.

I got into engineering because I wanted to understand how the physical world actually works. Badly enough that, without formal schooling, I probably would've gotten myself killed figuring it out. In middle school, I blew the fuse box at my parents' house by chaining like 5 plug adapters together into the wall. (They've since forgiven me.) Math and science drew me in because they were the fundamental rules underneath everything. Certain laws just can't be broken in the universe. Once you have that framework, you can approach almost any problem. It transfers.

That curiosity has a pretty specific flavor though. I’m drawn to what things are foundationally built on. Materials are the building blocks of the physical world. Energy is the building block of modern technology, especially now with AI. Nobody glamorizes these fields but everything runs on them. I think about this stuff more than is probably healthy. That being said I don't just sit and think, I build too.

I spent four years building a deep tech hardware company. It was really fun and really hard. I did a lot of the dirty, scrappy engineering work. But I also helped run the whole thing. Fundraising, product strategy, sales, supply chain, building and keeping a team together. I'm an engineer at heart and will always want to be close to the thing being built, but I'm also not just an engineer anymore and I think that's a good thing.

Outside of that: I do endurance running, play guitar (ask me about my vintage '63 Mustang!), and am weirdly into MMA. I love the outdoors, as long as there's no snow. I'm bad at small talk but great at hard problems, which I think is a reasonable tradeoff. My girlfriend says I'm earnest. My friends say I'm funny. Both are probably true and I'm not sure what to do with either.

BS Aerospace Engineering  ·  MS Materials Science (dropped out of the PhD. no regrets.)