Sarah Thornton

LinkedIn

Current Occupation: TLM Autonomous Software Systems Engineering

Undergraduate University: UC Berkeley

Graduate University: MIT, Stanford

Answers from the Mentor:

1. What led you to pursue your current career sector?
   Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to work on self-driving cars. I chose to study Mechanical Engineering in hopes of being able to enter either the automotive or robotics industries. Cars are really fun with their promise of freedom while robots promise a future of a better world. By the time I was graduating with my PhD, there was fortuitously an emerging autonomous vehicle industry where I could combine both of those passions.
2. If you could give one piece of advice to graduate students exploring career options, what would it be?Before you enter the job market and while you still have access to a plethora of academic resources, try to identify possible career skill gaps and then take those classes or work on projects to fill them. For example, my PhD lab mostly worked in Matlab/Simulink, but as the autonomous vehicle industry was emerging they were hiring people with strong computer programming skills, especially in C++. Hence, I took C++ courses and was part of the team in my lab that converted our entire Matlab/Simulink work into C++ where we could directly apply professional coding standards and practices into our graduate student research.