Life updates
Dec 14, 2025
It’s been a couple of years since I gave a personal update, so here it goes: I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in May and am now living in Boston.
I had a great time in Pittsburgh, and made some brilliant and supportive friends at CMU. It was an awesome opportunity to be a part of the Robotics Institute. Everywhere I turned, there was something new to learn. I wouldn’t say I had imposter syndrome, but there were many times when the concepts in class were so absurdly over my head that I laughed. It felt great to be pushed to my limits, to be reminded that there was so much out there that I had yet to learn. And if by some miracle I did learn everything in the textbooks, there were still entire branches of mathematics, A.I., and electronics waiting to be discovered.
I believe I made the most of it, spending many late nights in the Field Robotics Center debugging circuits and many early mornings walking robots out to the “field” (Schenley Park) for outdoor trials. My time at CMU reinforced my love for field robotics: Bringing robots into the chaos of the real world is like watching a comedy unfold. When testing the reforestation robot in the park, we had to contend with territorial deer snorting at our robot, curious children tottering up to it, people walking by with their dogs, and so on. We needed to tune the robot’s behavior to be safe, even polite, in these situations while still planting its trees efficiently.
I’m now an engineer at the Robotics and AI (“RAI”) Institute in Cambridge, MA. It feels a lot like CMU over here. Every day I’m humbled and amazed by the scientists that I work with, and I’m learning just as much as I was in Pittsburgh. I’m also fortunate to work in an organization that’s committed to public outreach and ethics. We have a dedicated outreach team that hosts popup events around Boston, expanding public awareness of how robots and AI can really shape our lives. Employees are encouraged to give tours to family and friends, and our scientific findings are published in journals for the world to see. We also have a “Robots, Ethics, and Society” group that thinks critically about how AI will change our world. This is how AI research ought to be.
Beyond my work at RAI, I’m still actively involved in farm robotics. I was lucky to help present the reforestation robot that I helped build at FIRA (the conference for the Global Organization for Agricultural Robotics) in October. I’m working with a local farm in the Boston area to develop truly useful automation tools, instead of flashy gimmicks (stay tuned). At a high level, there are two challenges that I want to help alleviate (though I know I can only play a small part): Hunger and climate change. I believe that farm robotics, with its potential to alleviate labor challenges in sustainable agriculture, can help with both.
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard write, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” How am I spending my days? Am I doing the most good with what I’ve been given? I’m not a student anymore. I have all the formal education I need to do something great. Anything short would be a wasted opportunity. The question, of course, is how to begin.