A New Way to Fly

One day, Sarah Wang ’17 hopes that she can look up into the sky and see a project she’s worked on, whisking people to and from wherever they need to go, in a cleaner, electric way.

That’s what she’s doing at Joby Aviation, an electric take-off and landing (eVTOL) start-up based in Santa-Cruz.

“I don’t know if it was aviation itself that drew me to the company, but I thought it was cool to be working on something that would eventually fly,” she says.

When considering what she wanted to do with her life, Wang first set her cap on working in the medical field because she wanted to help people. So, she left her home state of Kentucky to pursue engineering at Harvey Mudd College. Even from her first campus tour, the College stood out to her when she saw “professors taking the time to engage with prospective students,” she says.

While a student, she took full advantage of being at Mudd and near the other Claremont Colleges. In addition to her studies, she went to Pomona College to both participate in ballroom dancing and practice Japanese and Mandarin at the Oldenburg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations there.

“The Mudd curriculum is very strenuous, and it can be easy to stay on Mudd’s campus and not go anywhere else,” she says, which is why forcing herself to make the 15-minute walk to and from Pomona to do these extracurriculars was an important part of having a well-rounded college experience.

But, of course, classroom work is important too. Wang found her first job there when she did a Clinic project with medical device consulting firm Triple Ring Technologies. After she graduated, the company hired her full-time as an embedded software engineer.

She had gotten her foot in the door of the medical field, but soon realized it might not have been what she really wanted to do after all. The projects she worked on seemed to impact a very small number of people instead of making a big impact on large groups.

Wang didn’t know that opportunity would come in aviation, but she credits her Mudd experience with enabling her to be flexible enough—and confident enough in her abilities—to pivot when she found something that did seem like an opportunity to impact more people.

A fellow Mudd alum who was earning a PhD degree at Stanford attended a talk by someone at Joby Aviation and told her about it. The company seemed exciting and appeared to be doing important work. Not only has Joby partnered with NASA on electric flight projects, but it’s also developing its own electric, aerial rideshare vehicle that could provide a cleaner, greener way of travel.

Wang started out as an embedded software engineer there and is now a senior development assurance engineer, making sure that the software used on Joby aircrafts meets safety and regulatory standards set by the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S., the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and other certification authorities around the world. Without meeting these requirements to earn proper certifications, no aircraft are allowed to fly.

The job requires “enough technical background to be able to conduct oversight on the software development and ensure that the design is safe and compliant to regulatory standards,” Wang says. And while the company isn’t brand new (Joby first partnered with NASA in 2012), the concept of creating air rideshares as a means of transportation still is.

Wang says that Mudd’s emphasis on “first principles,” where professors asked them to not just solve a problem using known methods, but also to understand it down to its fundamentals, taught her how to tackle the unknowns in an emerging field. She is constantly challenging assumptions and often asks herself “what are the core principles that are driving the problem?” to provide a fresh perspective in the field of regulatory compliance.

She also credits Mudd with emphasizing the importance of communication and busting the stereotype that it wasn’t important for engineers to know how to write. “When it comes to my job, I love documenting my work because it helps me absorb what I just learned,” she says. It also allows her to share her work with other people in a way that they can understand and then invite them to “provide constructive feedback because they understand it through my writing.”

And while it’s not in the medical field, Wang doesn’t see this work as out of line with her original goal of helping everyday people. “In the Bay Area, where there’s a lot of congestion, having this mode of transportation would save you an hour a day of sitting in traffic and instead spend that time with your loved ones,” she says (and, indeed, Joby has worked with Delta Airlines, Toyota and Uber).

Stack up all those hours for all those people, and it could make a difference in terms of providing an electric option to cut down on carbon emissions and improve people’s quality of life. That’s what makes her hopeful that in the future she will see her work high in the sky. Wang wants to one day point to a Joby aircraft and “tell my friends and family that ‘I worked on that.’”