Zhang reflects that she was drawn to the Institute by the promise of exciting research and brilliant people, but also by the emphasis on collaboration. “I have definitely have not been disappointed,” she says, citing the MIT community’s “collective desire to learn and do something meaningful with the knowledge you have.”
Zhang, a recipient of the Robert A. Laudise Memorial Fund scholarship, hopes to help society make great strides toward sustainability and clean energy. Recognizing a need for financial as well as technical expertise, she double majors in materials science and engineering and finance. Her curriculum includes coursework at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
To enable next-generation energy sources, she explains, it is critical to have both scientific knowledge and a firm understanding of the numbers involved. “Practical matters, like ‘What kind of financing do I need to actually create this manufacturing line?’” Being a double major, she says, “gives me this other viewpoint into the up-and-coming materials in the sustainability and energy space.”
Zhang applied this dual approach to choosing summer internships, seeking experience in both engineering and finance to help identify her ideal career choice. The summer after her first year at MIT, she interned at a hedge fund assisting with fund accounting, tax, and valuation. “From that I realized that I didn’t want to be doing just the finance side,” she says. “I was missing the stimulation from the science, the theoretical approach, all the things I love.”
The following summer, she worked in field engineering at an electronic components supplier for electric vehicle (EV) projects. “It was a little bit of engineering because you do have to understand what this battery system looks like for a car, and it was also a lot of business: thinking about sales and strategy and how to approach customers in these different fields.”
While she enjoyed working at the intersection of her two majors, this role “wasn’t quite technical enough for me,” she explains.
