The Power of Caltech Mentors

by Andrew Moseman

“I think Caltech is the only place where I can do what I’m doing,” says graduate student Tinashe Handina to his mentor, Eric Mazumdar, an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences and economics. “At any other school, I’d have to find an economics professor and a machine learning professor. But here at Caltech, I got you.”

Handina and Mazumdar sat down together in the video above, Caltech Bonds: The Relationships That Drive the Science, which was developed in connection with the Initiative for Caltech Students. In that video, Handina describes how, motivated by having lived through an economic crisis in his native Zimbabwe, he had wanted to discover how mathematics and technology could be used to solve economics problems, something he now studies in Mazumdar’s lab.

The clip also highlights the power of Caltech mentorship through the example of Charles Elachi (PhD ’71), Caltech Professor of Electrical Engineering and Planetary Science, Emeritus, and former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. He advised Joudi Hajar, an electrical engineering graduate student, to get out of her comfort zone to do great things. In her case, that meant leaving Lebanon to take a chance on Caltech. 

“It’s always refreshing to see the curiosity and the interest of young people who are coming with fresh ideas,” Elachi says. “I almost learn more from you than you learn from me being a mentor.”

For more on the impact of mentorship on graduate students’ work, ambitions, and experiences at Caltech, watch the full video. 

The Initiative for Caltech Students is a fundraising campaign that supports undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, health and wellness, career advising, and co-curricular experiences in order to help students like these achieve their full potential.