Meet Your Summer Mentor: Pete 

Topic:  Machine Learning, Robotics, and Software Engineering 

There hasn’t been a more exciting time to be start getting involved with emerging topics in computer science, like machine learning and robotics. Since these are such fast-moving fields, even a newcomer (including high school students!) could begin to make significant contribu- tions to the worldwide community. We would spend the summer working together on a handful of related topics in one of these areas. Possible goals could include writing software from scratch for a robot, contributing to an open-source software library, or writing new control algorithms for helicopters / quadcopters. Zero previous experience with robots or programming required! 

*Pete is at capacity for the summer mentorship program and unable to take new students

Pete was born and raised in the Bay Area of California. Pete now spends his time developing next-generation robots as a PhD student in Computer Science at MIT.  Before MIT, Pete did his undergraduate degree at Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa), where he majored in Chemistry and won the Shapiro Prize for being within the top 2% of his class. Pete then did a one-year Master’s at Cambridge (U.K.), where he wrote a thesis on Physics. His employment experiences have included working for NASA and working for a venture-backed startup back at home in Silicon Valley for a year before starting his PhD.  

Pete believes in learning by doing, whether with programming, math, or any discipline -- technical or not.  His teaching and tutoring experiences have included teaching freshman year Physics as a TA at Cambridge University, working as a Princeton University writing tutor, and spending a summer in China as a full-time English teacher.  Pete very much enjoys acting as a mentor both in and outside the classroom — he spent two seasons after college coaching 11-13 year old football, spent three seasons in college coaching 8-10 year old basketball, and led three years of outdoor backpacking trips for freshman orientation at Princeton. 

Outside of tutoring, there are too many other things that Pete loves to do that involve being a nerd, including modifying and battling quadcopters.  Pete also loves playing banjo, running, hiking, and surfing.

Interview with Pete

1) Why are you excited to teach a mentorship in machine learning? 

I'm excited to work with younger students and write some code or work on some robots.  This is an amazing time to be working on this kind of stuff, and that especially goes for someone who's at the high school level.

2) What inspired you to pursue computer science?

I spent a good amount of time looking around the world for the most exciting area of science and technology I could find, and so here I am studying computer science and robotics at MIT

3) What will I get out of this mentorship? 

There is so much that you can learn about programming that nobody teaches you in school -- you just have to do it, and the best way to do it is with a mentor.  Depending on how we decide to structure your project, you could pick up any number of skills from software development to the applied math underlying machine learning.