Class of 2016, BS in Electrical Engineering



During the fall of her junior year, Claire Durand found Professor Joseph Picone's signals and systems course so exacting that she seriously considered dropping out of engineering. After a lot of hard work and some sleepless nights, however, she earned both an A and the confidence to get through anything.

"Dr. Picone stretches students as far as they can go—like a rubber band, he likes to say—and afterwards you realize you have really extended yourself and retained more than you thought," says the electrical engineering major, who this May will graduate magna cum laude.

The experience in Picone's class also spurred her to get more actively involved in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and to participate in computer programming hackathons, at which she collaborated with others on programming challenges. That led to her to the hackNY Fellows Program, a highly regarded paid fellowship in which she will be paired this summer with an innovative New York tech startup firm. "The firms have very few engineers, so you are really expected to pull your own weight," she says.

Durand, whose father is a dual national, was born and raised in France and then lived with her grandmother near Harrisburg her last three years of high school. While at Temple, she spent one summer as an intern developing perfume bottle design software at a small glass manufacturer in Normandy, France, and last summer interned in JP Morgan Chase's Technology Analyst Program in Newark, Delaware. She is also the treasurer of the Temple student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a member of HKN, the IEEE's honors society.

Following her NYC internship, Durand will enter an electrical engineering master's degree program at Columbia University, where she will focus on machine learning—developing software that trains computers to learn like human beings. "Software development is growing exponentially," she says. "Most of what we will be doing in the future is going to be affected by software in some way or another, so I think it's a fantastic field to be in."