Graduate students’ faculty mentors play a major role guiding students’ careers. Other useful resources at Princeton include professional development resources through the Graduate School and the annual Science and Technology Job Fair.

After students receive their graduate degree from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton, they typically follow one of three career tracks: academia, industry, or work at a government-funded national laboratory. 

For example, recent graduates have found post-doctoral employment at Stanford, MIT, Notre Dame, Brown, Penn State, and right here at Princeton.

They found jobs as hardware engineers at Apple; senior aerospace engineers at Lockheed Martin; and senior engineers at Samsung Electronics in South Korea. They have also joined Microsoft as a data scientist, Intel as a research scientist, Merrill Lynch as a robo-quant adviser, Amazon.com as an applied scientist, and a postdoc at the IBM Watson Research Center. Some have started their own businesses.

And they have been hired as staff scientists and research associates at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Colorado.

Just a few well-known alumni of Princeton Engineering’s graduate program include:

• Norman Augustine (MSE ’59), the retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin and winner of the National Medal of Technology;
• Robert Kahn (Ph.D. ’64), co-founder of the internet and chairman, CEO and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives;
• Eli Harari (Ph.D. ’73), the retired founder of SanDisk and winner of the National Medal of Technology;
• Dave Munson (Ph.D. ’79), president of Rochester Institute of Technology;
• Linda Abriola (Ph.D. ’83), former dean of engineering of Tufts University and current director of the Tufts Institute of the Environment;
• Alice Gast (Ph.D. ’84), president of the Imperial College London;
• Lisa Jackson (MSE ’86), former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and current vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple, Inc.;
• Jennifer Sinclair Curtis (Ph.D. ’89), dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis;
• Mun Young Choi (Ph.D. ’92), president of the University of Missouri System;
• Alec Gallimore (Ph.D. ’92), dean of engineering at University of Michigan;
• John Ochsendorf (MSE ’98), MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” fellow; and
• Subhash Khot (Ph.D. ’03), winner of the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the highest honor for young researchers.