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May
22, 2004, 16S:
Special Commencement Issue
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Bechtel
Achievement Award: Emery
Sanford, ME
Bechtel
Engineering Scholarship:
Austin Minnich, Eng. Science
Departmental
Citation Winners:
Ryan Doan, BioE
Sarah Gidding, CEE
Kevin Simler, EECS
Olivia Or, Eng. Science
Anthony Paganini, IEOR
Priam Pillai, MSE
Matt Panzer, ME
Ryan Hannink, NE
Other
Departmental Awards
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Photo
by Nick Lammers
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Mechanical
Engineering Citation: Matt Panzer
Doing well in school came easily to Matt Panzer because it was never
a chore.
“ I really love mechanical engineering because I like to understand
physically what is going on,” says the ME major/physics minor.
His love of the subject is so great he often reads physics and engineering
books for fun.
But Matt doesn’t just eat, sleep, and drink engineering. Besides
wrapping his mind around the physical, he also likes to get physical.
When not working he can be found rock climbing, skiing, snowboarding,
wakeboarding, and weightlifting. He also loves to read.
On campus he busied himself as a fraternity brother at Kappa Delta Rho
and participated in a physics tutoring program geared to minority students
at Cal.
After graduating in December, Matt landed a job at engineering consulting
firm Applied Biomechanics, reconstructing and simulating car accidents.
He plans to stay there until he heads off to study ME at Stanford next
fall.
After he gets his Ph.D., Matt wants to work in a cutting-edge national
research laboratory with the modest goal of “making history in engineering.”
He wants to make contributions along the lines of Isaac Newton and Einstein,
the two engineers he most admires.
Winning the departmental citation came as a nice surprise to Matt, especially
after the tease of being nominated for the University medal twice.
Last summer Matt got a taste for research by working at the Lawrence Livermore
National Lab in the defense technology engineering division. He worked
on measuring micron-sized targets used as fusion targets. He has also
done drafting work for general engineering contractors and some construction
work.
Matt came to Berkeley because he thought it was the kind of environment
that would push him to succeed. He says he succeeded by motivating himself
to do things because he wanted to, not because he had to.
His most memorable moment at Berkeley was finally getting an A in English,
a feat he never managed to accomplish in high school. That grade meant
more to him than any of his stellar marks in engineering because he earned
it for something he wasn’t naturally good at.
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