SOHAM MANJREKAR

Ten months at GridTran, one office party, and a holiday weekend spread across three states.

The honest measure of how much the company has grown is the conference table. When I started there was room to spread out at it. At the Fourth of July party we were shoulder to shoulder, and I was still being introduced to people. The family has grown considerably, and I do mean family.

Holiday weekends are when the gratitude list gets its annual audit. This team is near the top of mine. Ten months is long enough to know who you would want next to you when something on the bench refuses to work at five in the afternoon, and I have a full set of those people now.

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My next stop was a short hop to DC to see my good buddy Neil. We had two birthdays to get through, his 24th and America’s 250th, and we did both in style: rowdy games, better company, and food that would have justified the trip on its own.

This is the only photo I took of the entire encounter, which tells you everything you need to know about how the weekend was going.

Neil has also been arguing with me about the correct order of milk and cereal since long before either of us had any business holding opinions. He is wrong. He has always been wrong. It is one of the great constants of my life and I would not trade it.

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I rounded out the vacation with a quick trip back home to my family, where we marked the occasion the way real Americans do, with a good cookout.

A cookout in my family means somebody stands over the coals for an hour insisting they do not need help while everyone else brings them things. The chicken went on in two colors, pale and slightly less pale, and came off correct. The sausages required no supervision and got plenty.

Back home Sunday night, slightly sunburnt, entirely full.

It is official. The first guy in our group is not only engaged, he is having his bachelor party. So, Miami.

Clubs, convertibles and cabanas on the beach. We did it up, which is the only respectable way to handle a first.

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Congrats, Kulkarni. I am pumped for your wedding. It will be the best and the first wedding our group does, and it is entirely fitting that it is yours.

You and Kiran are some of my best friends, and I am so glad you asked us to come celebrate with you. I wish we could do it like that every day.

Four and a half grad students larping as locals, dressed like the most performative males you have ever seen.

So begins the yearly pilgrimage. We go to the same sights, we eat at the same places, and all of it lands anyway, because when you’re in the city activities don’t need to be new to work on you.

First visit under the management of Zohran, which practically speaking meant standing at a crosswalk reading a road sign out loud.

New York is always great. New York with these people is better, and that is most of the reason the trip is annual.

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Broadway

Fresh off the plane from ATL we hopped onto the bus with ALL of our stuff and beelined it for the Lyric Theatre to catch our night show of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, with Tom Felton as Draco.

The eating

More food than pizza was eaten. But, by God, a lot of pizza was consumed.

Between the sit-down meals there is the other category, the one eaten standing up on a sidewalk in a small circle.

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Shoutout to KEYS, the speakeasy in the West Village. If you find yourself in that part of town in need of an oasis on a bad night out to Spainard, go in and chill out.

Same trip next year, presumably. Same sights, same slices, same idiots.

A day trip, a quick alumni mixer, and Illinois handling VCU. ILL. INI.

Drive in, watch basketball, drive out. There is a particular kind of good day that consists entirely of one thing you were looking forward to, and this was one.

The alumni mixer came first, and it was exactly the format it needed to be: orange and blue everywhere, a burger special, an ALUMNI placard on the table, a pile of pom poms nobody was going to be shy about using later. Put two Illinois grads in a room and one of them says ILL before anybody has agreed to start.

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Then the game. VCU never really got it going, and the shot of the scoreboard I kept is the one with twenty points of daylight and three and a half minutes left, which is the exact moment a tournament game stops being stressful and starts being fun.

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And they kept going. All the way to the Final Four, which is further than I let myself hope for in March, and then UConn.

Again.

I have decided not to write about that part. The day itself was perfect and I am choosing to end the entry here, at 71 to 51, with the pom poms still in somebody’s hand.

ILL.

Snorkeling straight off the beach, island roads, stroopwafels. What is not to love about the ABC islands.

The trip summarizes cleanly: too much time in the pool and too much time in the ocean. Both turn out to be good for the soul and for the spirit, and I have no notes.

We drove the island roads, and I am putting in writing that we went the wrong way down a one way for a while, so it counts as a confession rather than a rumor. We also saw peacocks. Nobody had mentioned the peacocks. I have chosen to file them as a bonus feature.

The food deserves its own sentence, so here it is: the food was really, genuinely good, and I did not have one meal I would trade.

Overall a great trip. We will do it again. At some point. Probably.

The hardest part about leaving undergrad is that you cannot take your friends with you. So I suppose you have to go to them.

Enter Spooky Season. Quite impulsively, all of us booked tickets and met in San Francisco for the weekend, Friday through Monday, on the reasoning that Halloween landing on a Friday is not a circumstance you can ignore.

We went full tourist mode and made no apologies for it. Fisherman’s Wharf. Ghirardelli Square. The Stanford Quad. Matcha, brunch and boba, in quantities I would be embarrassed by if I were the sort of person who gets embarrassed about being a performative male.

And to round it out, a bar crawl on Halloween. We went as Alvin and the Chipmunks. I will not be elaborating.

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This one goes on the Mount Rushmore of trips for me. I will not forget it soon, and I expect to miss it often.

A lifetime of impact in research and industry, and I got to be in the room on the day we marked it.

Start with the numbers, because they are faintly ridiculous. More than 80 patents. Nearly 35,000 citations. An IEEE Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Then the companies he founded and ran: SoftSwitching Technologies, Varentec, Innovolt, SmartWires, GridBlock, GigaGrid, GridTran. Those are only the ones I know about.

When people say power electronics has its legends, this is who they mean. They don’t make em like this anymore.

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I am truly grateful to have been one of Prof. Divan’s students, and as it turns out, his last Masters student. After only a year of working with him has changed how I think about the urgent challenges that we face as power electronics engineers today. Prof. Divan’s ability to contextualize engineering challenges within the broader energy landscape has taught me how to think holistically and the importance of identifying great problems to pursue greater solutions. His rigorous commitment to impactful research has set a standard that I will carry forward in my career.

The send-off was a classy affair and just the right size for the occasion. People came, ate, and told stories about him, there is a photo somewhere of the after party where around 15 former and current grad students were crowded around him as he told stories about the early days of power electronics, the state of academic research and where its come til now. I don’t think you could pay those students enough to get them to leave while the inventor of the Dual Active Bridge was talking about inventing it.

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Dr. Divan has officially closed his door at GT (Georgia Tech) and opened a new one at GT (GridTran).

Thank you, Prof., for everything you have contributed to this field and for everything you will do. I have learned an enormous amount in the past year and I am looking forward to this next stint at GridTran, and to continuing the fun.

The real work begins now!

Three days in Austin for the IEEE PES General Meeting. First time in the city, and I chose the back half of July to do it.

Everyone warns you about the heat and everyone is right. What nobody mentions is that the evenings are the payoff. I came back into downtown at dusk on the first night and the sky did the thing you see below, which I took through a half-open car window at a red light and have not stopped looking at since.

The walk along the river is the best part of the city, and I say that having tried fairly hard to find something better. The path hugs the water, the skyline sits on the far bank the whole way around, and the neighborhoods that back onto it are the sort you can wander into without a plan and still come out having eaten well. I walked more of it than my shoes were built for.

Sixth Street I liked more than I expected to. Doors open, four bands audible at once, none of them apologizing for it. It should not work as well as it does.

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The reason I was there

The meeting itself was my first real look at how the Student Branch Chapters and Young Professionals groups inside IEEE PES actually run. Most of what they do is unglamorous and matters enormously: keeping a chapter alive across graduating cohorts, putting a first-year student in a room with someone who has spent thirty years on protection or on machines, running the events that turn a vague interest in power into a direction.

Sitting in on those sessions and meeting the people who do that work was the part of the trip I did not anticipate enjoying most. Plenty of them volunteer the time on top of full research loads or full jobs.

The point they kept coming back to is one worth repeating. A student’s access to expertise is mostly an accident of which school they landed at and who happened to be down the hall. Programs like these are how that stops being an accident: they hand a student in a small department the same mentors, the same conference rooms and the same conversations that a student at a large one gets for free. It was a genuine privilege to be introduced to the folks holding that up, and I came home with a longer list of people to stay in touch with than I brought.

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Verdict on Austin: I understand the fuss. Verdict on late July in Texas: I would go back in a cooler month and I would go back either way.