Quadrotors

One of the cool things about LGO - MIT in general really - is all the cool stuff that's going on around here.  Every time I have a few minutes to wander around I never fail to find something new - from a nautical museum to a model of an asteroid field and just about anything in between.  As well, you are surrounded by a lot of brilliant people in the greater MIT community, doing research on all kinds of interesting topics.  For example, a friend of mine is a PhD student in the Aero/Astro program, and for his master's project he's working on variable pitch quadrotor helicopters... which he can fly upside down.  The other day I went and visited him at his lab and saw what he was working on in-person - it was awesome.  A video of his work is below - it reminds me of a cross between a villain from a sci-fi movie and Barry Sanders.

Research like this is going on all around you, and it's simply a matter fo finding what interests you and exploring.  Of course, the focus of our engineering curriculum and internships in LGO makes our thesis research somewhat different than that of our pure engineering counterparts.  Ours is generally (but not exclusively) focused on projects that will have immediate operational impact for a partner company, while students like my friend might be using technology in ways that haven't yet been explored, where any potential real-world benefit isn't yet known.  Still, even though our research is focused on different things, it's a lot of fun to explore the cool things that are going on throughout the MIT campus, and it makes it an awesome place to be.