Electrical engineering professor Dushan Boroyevich made a point of sitting next to Christina DiMarino during a dinner in spring 2012.
As the then co-director of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES), Boroyevich was on a recruitment mission. He saw promise in DiMarino, who’d been offered a competitive Webber Fellowship to study at Virginia Tech.
There was only one problem: DiMarino didn’t know what power electronics was.
“I came for recruitment weekend and got to visit a bunch of labs,” DiMarino said. “But actually CPES was not one of the labs that I chose to visit … which, apparently, was a mistake.”
Recruitment weekend allowed her to explore options for her upcoming studies through Virginia Tech’s direct Ph.D. program, which allowed her to move straight from her general engineering undergraduate degree at James Madison University into her doctorate studies in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech.
“The last event for that recruitment weekend was a dinner, and Dushan sat right next to me and asked, ‘are you Christina?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘did you tour CPES?’ I said no,” DiMarino recalled. “And he said, ‘Ok, after dinner, you’re going to come tour the CPES lab.’”
Read the full story and see my photos via Virginia Tech Engineer, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s award-winning alumni magazine