By recent graduate Kesavan Yogeswaran’s reckoning, serendipity played a key role in shaping his academic path. As a high school student, for instance, Yogeswaran had his “heart set on Stanford” but a campus preview weekend at MIT featuring Ultimate Frisbee — one of his passions– convinced him that the “culture felt like home.” He was also taken with MIT’s undergraduate research opportunities, as well as its “top-notch engineering and physics programs.”
Yogeswaran didn’t so much steer his way toward studying energy, but “stumbled into it.” He was “bouncing around between physics and electrical engineering” as a major, and happened on the subject 8.21, “The Physics of Energy.” He found it “highly interesting, because it covered a huge range of topics, and managed to teach them at a high level.” He hung onto the class notes for future reference, and realized that he was interested in getting more exposure to the field of energy.
In his junior year, Yogeswaran learned of the newly available Energy Studies minor, whose requirements he had unintentionally begun to fulfill. “I decided to go for it, and take the remaining required classes,” says Yogeswaran.
An internship in California the following summer working on innovative wind turbine technology helped solidify Yogeswaran’s interest in energy. “I was impressed by how passionate and driven everyone there was about the project. If they could get this idea off the ground, it would be revolutionary.” Joby Energy, a startup firm, was working on a prototype of a kind of wing with propellers to harness the great force of winds typical of higher altitudes. Energy generated by the turbines was fed down by a cable tethered to the ground, and Yogeswaran was hired to assist with the electric conversion end of the technology. “It was cool to work on something like that,” he says.
He returned to MIT senior year “definitely wanting to do power electronics,” not least because it would allow him to work with a variety of renewable energy technologies. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering last year, Yogeswaran found a way to combine his major and minor studies. He is currently pursuing an MIT master’s degree with a project that involves developing novel micro inverters for solar panels, which may someday get solar-generated electricity into the grid more efficiently. After collecting his degree, Yogeswaran plans to go straight into industry, ideally working for a company in the green energy sector.