5 years out by Matt McGann '00

Like many universities, MIT has an alumni magazine that it sends to its graduates. But unlike many universities, MIT’s alumni magazine is a real publication sold on newsstands that people actually want to read: Technology Review.

Actually, what you buy on newsstands is a slimmed-down version of what alumni receive. I, along with 100,000+ other MIT grads, receive what might be called Technology Review++, that is, the usual magazine with an extra section devoted to MIT-related news & articles. The highlight for many alums is the “Class Notes” section, a regular column written by each year’s alumni class secretary keeping everyone up-to-date on their classmates’ developments.

This summer, I was elected to a five-year term as Class of 2000 secretary. My first Class Notes deadline was this weekend. As I was writing it, I realized how interesting my classmates are, and thought I might share some of it with you. This month, I received news from 29 members of the Class of 2000 members; below, find an unedited list (that is, I didn’t exclude anyone with “lesser” jobs or anything like that) of what these several dozen MIT alums are up to.

• President and Founder of EJ Enterprises Worldwide; was described by Discovery Channel as “the future of dance music” [this one deserves its own blog entry; check out http://www.ejenter.com/discovery/
• co-founder of Warren Light Craft, a small, kayak manufacturing company [again, this one is worthy of its own entry; check out http://www.warrenlightcraft.com]
• working on different high-tech and economic development projects in Buenos Aires, including the MIT $50K Global Startup Workshop
• actor in a one-woman all-request show, Shakespeare on Request
• Senior Associate, McKinsey & Co
• Vice President, Wall Street Analytics
• Corporate Strategy Manager at Microsoft
• IT consultant, Electronic Knowledge Interchange
• Software Engineer at IBM
• Bioterrorism Preparedness Food Safety Coordinator with the Hawaii State Department of Health
• urban planner at Dyatt & Bhatia
• student life administrator at Duke University
• administrator at the Harvard School of Public Health
• admissions officer at MIT (this one is me, obviously)
• completed PhD in finance at Stanford, research associate at Barclays Global Investors
• completed PhD at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, now a a post-doctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
• completed UVA law school, now clerking on the Supreme Court of Virginia
• graduated from BU law school, opened own trademark & copyright litigation office
• completed PhD in organic chemistry at UC-Berkeley, doing postdoctoral research in nanoscale electronics jointly at UCLA and Caltech
• completed PhD from Stanford, now an assistant professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon
• completed PhD in Biology from the MIT/WHOI joint program, beginning postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh working on bacteriophage
• completed MD at UT Southwestern Medical School, surgical residency in New York City
• Army Reserve (including tours in Bosnia and Iraq), pursuing a Masters in Security Studies at Georgetown
• left JP Morgan as an associate, began Columbia law school
• teaching high school math & physics, and getting an MBA from Texas A&M
• Harvard Medical School student
• MBA student at Notre Dame
• PhD student at UMass-Amherst in polymer science & engineering
• graduate student in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins

While many universities (including MIT) have lists of older, more established alumni prominently in their publications, it can be harder to figure out what you might be doing only a few years out of college. I hope this entry is a somewhat helpful introduction to young alumni careers. I will be writing more entries on post-MIT careers in the future.