The start of college often involves more questions than answers. For students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), that uncertainty plays out across a program of more than 3,000 students and countless academic paths.

“It felt like I didn't have a compass,” ECE master’s student Shreyashi Dutta said. “The program felt massive, and I wasn't entirely sure where my place was within it.”

That sense of uncertainty is often the starting point. Over time, many students find direction through coursework, peers, mentors, and experiences that few programs can match.

“I came into Georgia Tech knowing I was interested in cybersecurity, but I didn’t yet understand where I fit within it,” ECE master’s student Sabina Sokol said. “That started to change in my very first semester.”

It also offers support from a community that shares interests and understands the academic (and life) challenges that come with the journey.

As 509 ECE students graduate this weekend, many are reflecting on their time in ECE, and the people and experiences that helped get them along the way.

She tackled it head-on, and it eventually produced fulfilling results. She helped her VIP team build a physical robot that could navigate real spaces and started working on GTRI projects that aligned more with her interests.

Now on the precipice of having completed her master’s degree, she leaves Georgia Tech with more than academic credentials, including a better understanding of herself.

“What started as a vague interest in cybersecurity became a clear direction grounded in hardware security and trust,” Sokol said. “I’m also taking a deeper understanding of how to actively shape my career and contribute to the communities I’m part of.”

After graduating, Sokol will join The Mitre Corporation in Boston as an embedded security engineer working on securing mission critical infrastructure like power grids, telecommunications, and national defense systems.

When Shreyashi Dutta started as a computer engineering student in 2022, she was trying to find where she fit into the program, both academically and personally.

She started by attending Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering (WECE) meetings because of some outreach the group did at her high school.

“Initially, I started going to the meetings just to show up, but I kept returning because of the people,” she said.

That would turn out to be exactly where she was supposed to be. Through WECE, she ended up meeting her closest friends, landed her first internship, and by her third year, she was serving as president.

“WECE gave me a community before I even realized how much I needed one,” she said.

While WECE helped ground her personally, it was the Opportunity Research Scholars' (ORS) Program that gave her direction academically.

The program exposed her to many kinds of research and eventually to Assistant Professor Callie Hao’s Software/Hardware Co-Design Lab.

There, she helped research how to make hardware designs more accessible. She was getting to build tangible systems and eventually co-authored a paper that she shared at TECHCON 2024.

“The real turning point of my college career happened when I got to present that paper at a semiconductor fair,” Dutta said. “I made connections and realized how I wanted to work in the chip space. It gave me the motivation to try to land an internship at a chip company.”

She eventually did, becoming an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit Frontend Infrastructure intern at NVIDIA in the summer of 2025. After graduating, she’ll leave Atlanta for San Fransico to start a full-time job at Google. 

Coming with her will be all the experiences and lessons learned from Georgia Tech.

“I am leaving Georgia Tech with two things I didn't have when I started: a community that shaped who I am, and a clear path forward,” Dutta said. “As I pack up for San Francisco to start my career, I know my journey wasn't just about the coursework. ECE helped support me in my path to being an engineer and making lifelong friends.”

Speaking of friends, Rachel Ha and Tania Binu met as “shy quiz partners” in a linear algebra class. That partnership blossomed into a deep friendship that guided them through the joint BS/MS program at ECE and beyond.

“We realized the incredible academic synergy we had in that class and have become inseparable friends since,” Ha said.

Together they ran half marathons, walked the entirety of Atlanta’s 22-mile Beltline, and even hiked the notoriously difficult Acatenango volcano in Guatemala.

From a couple of freshmen taking quizzes to best friends walking across the stage, Binu and Ha were there for each other when they needed it most, and know their relationship is one they can count on past the walls of Van Leer as they embark on their post-graduate journey.

“Genuinely, we feel that neither of us would have been able to make it through the B.S. or M.S. programs without the support from one another. We’re so grateful to have met each other through ECE and Georgia Tech,” Binu said.