the cereal king

6.334 had a test yesterday. There was no time limit and the professor interrupted the test after an hour for an ice cream break. Two of the three problems were either out of the textbook or from the review packet. Ridiculous.

Yes, you, intrepid reader, should care…

So Julian and I were having a random conversation about some kind of breakfast cereal (I can’t even remember which one now), and I couldn’t remember some detail about this particular cereal. Apparently this was incomprehensible to Julian since I’m “the cereal king”. And so a new idea for a blog title was born. It sounds more authoritative than “i like cereal” anyways…

Short version: I’m going to be a Draper Fellow. Doing ridiculous things with high-efficiency RF power amplifiers and trying to cram them into as small a package as possible. And maybe figure out why they’re sometimes unstable. Yaay.

More details: My trip into Draper Laboratory was awesome. For those of you unfamiliar with the lab, it’s essentially a Department of Defense laboratory (with some commercial contracts) that was spun off from MIT during the Vietnam War. Just a few notes about my visit:

1. Security at Draper is tight. Really tight. My camera phone was confiscated at the desk and if I had brought my laptop with me, it would have been confiscated as well. And if I weren’t a U.S. citizen, apparently it would have been significantly more difficult to get in, never mind actually working there.
2. I thought I was going in just to learn more about the RF power amplifier project that I was contacted about. Turns out it was a full-blown interview for a Draper Fellow position. Whoops.
3. The current design of the “Class E” amplifier that I’m going to be looking at apparently incorporates a bunch of transmission line structure tricks that have to do with shunting harmonics away from the amplifier input and output. Highly awesome.
4. Doug (my new Draper adviser) and his boss both went to MIT as undergraduates. They both took 6.301, 6.302, 6.331, and 6.334, which made for a bunch of interesting conversations. Especially when I mentioned that Kassakian was now back teaching 6.334. Good times.
5. Doug’s also the guy that designed the 3562A dynamic analyzer at HP, which I used extensively during my 6.302 final lab. Another great conversation.
6. Doug’s boss is willing to pay for me to get a security clearance. Absolutely sweet.

Anyways, being a Draper Fellow has some other nice perks, including full funding, a fairly generous stipend (or so I’m told), and an incredible technical staff (no need to call Advanced Circuits to get a board fabricated). On the flip side, I need to work there this summer, which rules out a possible internship at ADI.

It’s nice to be able to finally figure out what I’m doing next year. And I now also have an exit plan for getting out of here. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel…

Or maybe not.

I added a bunch of links to fort-awesome people. Let me know if I left you out. If I did, it’s probably because you got lost in the mess, or because I wasn’t sure if you wanted to be linked to. In any case, it’s not because I hate you.

I promise a real post soon. Heading into Draper tomorrow to check out whether or not I can get a fully funded fellowship there for my M.Eng. thesis. It involves doing crazy stuff with high efficiency RF power amplifiers. I’ll try to put up something interesting afterwards.

I’m really stumped when it comes to titles for this blog. But this new one sounds better than the last one (”baseball, circuits, and stuff”)…

Maybe I’ll write something of substance here some time soon. Kind of drawing blanks as to what might be interesting though. I had all these ideas before I actually started this damn thing…

And I guess I should put up some links too…

Perhaps I’ve given in to the dark side. Let’s see how long it takes people to find this…

Leave a comment if you feel like. And I really need to come up with a better title…