Suor Kim '02

I graduated from Swarthmore in 2002 with a dual major in CS and Engineering. Besides the core courses, I've taken all the courses taught by Dr. Maxwell as well as Control Theory and Electronic Circuit Applications. While at Swarthmore, I performed research with Dr. Everbach in biomedical acoustics and with Dr. Maxwell in mobile robotics.

After Swarthmore, I enrolled in graduate school at Purdue University in ECE. I feel that Swarthmore Engineering prepared me well for the rigor and workload of grad school. The most valuable ability that you'll gain from Swarthmore is the ability to learn. You'll find that with this ability coupled with the Swarthmore work ethic, you'll end up at the top of the class whereas you may have been a mediocre student at Swarthmore, like myself. I attended grad school was because of a bad economy and because I didn't feel my education was enough. I'm primarily focusing on computer architecture with interests in related fields such as compilers and VLSI. I was a TA for digital logic design and will be a TA for senior digital design lab and although the syllabus was slightly different than that at Swarthmore, I was able to learn the new material well enough to teach it.

After receiving an MSECE degree in May, I will be joining 300 other programmers at Amazon.com in Seattle. We write the applications that support and further expand the world's largest e-commerce platform. I will work with the Tax Engine group. The group ensures that Amazon can sign on and support third-party merchants to charge proper sales tax, both domestic and international. We also work with other groups such as order management, shipping, and promotions.