James D. McLurkin ’95, SM ’04, PhD ’08

MCLURKIN: My name is James McLurkin, born in 1972. I'm an only child, no brothers, no sisters. I have a dog and pet ant.

INTERVIEWER: Were you born in Baldwin, New York? Or were you born somewhere else? Did your parents move when you were young?

MCLURKIN: So I spent most of my time growing up in Baldwin, New York; a sub-burough of Manhattan, about 20 miles out of the city. We moved around a bunch before I got to sixth grade. Then we got to Baldwin and then I stayed there. So that's where I claim.

INTERVIEWER: You got into high school, so you entered high school in 1986, but around then a lot of different stuff is happening. Do you have any specific memories of kind of seminal moments in American history? Like the Challenger? Or the first experience with a computer?

MCLURKIN: Let's see. So in 1986 entering high school. So my first experience actually with a computer, I remember Challenger 1980-- the first shuttle launch because they actually wheeled a television into my fourth grade classroom. That was a very big deal to have TV in class. My first computer came in '82. Actually my cousin was the instigator for a lot of my interest in technology. He's a year and a half older than I am. He and his family went to Disney World, and it was me, my grandmother, and my mother stuck in Virginia for the holidays. And he left his computer. So it was clear who I spent most of the time with that Christmas break. So after I got back home for Christmas I insisted that my Dad get me a computer.

So after Christmas we got a computer, an Atari 800XL. Had a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory, which was just unheard of. It's a huge, huge amount of memory. And I think it ran at one megahertz. It was a pretty studly machine. He didn't buy me any games, so I had to sit and write to copy programs from computer magazines.

So, what else do I remember from the '80s? Well, Transformers is on the mind right now because of the big mega hit that came out in 2007. And that was a big deal in the 80s. I mean, what do I remember from the 80s? I remember everything from the 80s.

INTERVIEWER: Well when you were programming video games were you programming in Basic? Or were you programming in something else or you just--

MCLURKIN: So in the era of the Atari, in the era of the computer hobbyists-- I got into it at the late end of the computer hobbyist kind of thing. And magazines would print code that you would type in. They'd print video games, so it was all in Basic. So we type in stuff in Basic, and they had [UNINTELLIGIBLE] with subroutines. You typed those in too, so it would be pages and pages of numbers-- of data and numbers and characters. And then they got sophisticated and they gave you little checksums. So you type this little program up that would then look at your code and give you some numbers about your numbers. You compared the numbers in the magazine and see if the numbers you typed were the correct numbers. I would recruit my parents sometimes to read me these numbers. They were not as amused at reading pages of numbers as I was. But it was a lot of fun. And programming video games for that class of computer-- where you have really serious computational constraints, something that helped me a lot when I was working on robots.

INTERVIEWER: So you entered high school, what was it like? Were you interested in going to college right away? Did you know what kind of track you were going to take after you get out of high school?

MCLURKIN: My interest in college was something-- I come from a long line of college educated African Americans, which is not very common. I'm a fourth generation college educated in my family. So the notion of going to college was never something I thought about. I actually didn't really know very much about different colleges. My mother and my father both went to Hampton, which is a historically black college in Virginia Beach. I just assumed I'd go to Hampton. I didn't really know anything about different colleges. And then I saw-- on Nova-- I saw a competition of what was then 2.70 270, the Intro to Mechanical Engineering class.

And they had these students. They had these things they'd built. They were driving around. They were competing. They were getting balls in cups and I was like, wow! That's great. I'm going there. And my mom's like, well, that's MIT. That's a hard school to get into. I was like, fine, I'm going there. That's where I want to go.

INTERVIEWER: You always allude to yourself that you're a geek. This is a fact that you're proud as a geek. And maybe you can explain what qualities make you a geek or what qualities are geek that you have as well? Is it something that should be aspired to or is it something that's a name?

MCLURKIN: So, I'm definitely a geek. You know, what is a geek? So at MIT you really have to kind of be careful with geeks, nerds because all these things have very different meanings. A nerd is somebody who is smart, intelligent. That works hard and does things. Is very nerdy, very hardworking. They can fit in socially, but a geek is someone who just doesn't quite fit in socially. And you don't really need to be smart to be geeky. But you do need to be interested in geeky kind of things, like science fiction and robots. And I have pet ants and I used to love BMX bicycles that put you on the fringe of society. This is before the X Games in the 80s. If you were a BMX guy you were some weird bicycle guy. All these things make you kind of geeky. But mostly interested in science, technology, science fiction, transformers, and--

INTERVIEWER: You had all these interests while you were in high school?

MCLURKIN: Oh yeah, all these interests were all in high school.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that in high school it was particularly being black and intelligent-- high school is difficult and it was painful. Was it the high school you were in, high school in general? Was it something that the lack of a role model-- I mean, what made it particularly difficult?

MCLURKIN: So being intelligent and interested in science and technology in America, at any age, is difficult. Being interested in technology and science and technical things in high school is especially difficult because now you're pushed out to the nerdy geeks and fringe of society. Being African American in high school and in to these things, you're now at a very small microcosm. And my high school that gave me a peer group of something like 3 out of 1,600 students. So socially, very difficult and I didn't quite fit into the black community because I was doing all this honor's geeky, nerdy, BMX stuff. I didn't have enough sophistication to be cool back then. Didn't know how to do it, wasn't interested in it. And didn't fit into the people in my classes. They were all white people. And it wasn't really a click friendship- wise. So it was difficult. And then you have to deal with all of the stuff of just being intelligent and geeky in high school in general is going to get you picked on in the locker room. It's going to get you chased around in the hallways and you have to deal with all that stuff too. So high school just was generally unpleasant.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any particular mentors or advisors who really stood out for you then? Who really cheered you on, besides your parents?

MCLURKIN: The bright spots in high school come from Mom and Dad, always very supportive, always very encouraging. Dad is an engineer by training, electrical engineer. And southern by birth from South Carolina. So when things are broken you don't throw them away, you take them apart and fix them. And things were always being taken apart and fixed. Everything was in a constant state of repair and re-repair. So lots of hands-on technical learning. And my mother, who I lived with, my parents are divorced, so I lived with Mom. She didn't understand all the technical stuff, but was very good at the logistics of getting resources and supplies, and getting things in the house that I needed to build robots. She had no idea what I was doing, but she found me a electronics store. She recognized that I had outgrown Radio Shack and got me to a local electronic store that had a much broader selection of components for me to use. So that's the core, the support.

You get to high school and my favorite science teacher-- well, actually when I got to high school I wasn't in any honors classes. I didn't do very well in middle school. I wasn't interested in studies or grades or with things like that. But I had one in high school. My ninth grade biology teacher recognized that I was bored, recognized that I could do much more and she put me in Honors Science, which was a big eye-opening experience. Classes were now much were interesting. The content was interesting, the teachers were much more interesting. In particular, my teacher was professor Eugene Warasilla and he was great because he ran another course. So he taught AP Biology at a very high level. And then he ran another course called Science Research Skills, which was an independent project course. You showed up with an idea and they would support you, not so much-- well, if you're doing biology he had all the resources you needed. But I was building robots, so from him I didn't get so many resources as I did get encouragement and moral support and competitions and good programs to enter. And just the validation that this is the good use of your time, working on this technology is very good. That was huge in terms of high school, that was huge support.

INTERVIEWER: So you applied at MIT, did you apply at any other colleges or were you just so set on MIT that you wouldn't take no for an answer?

MCLURKIN: So did I apply to other colleges? Kind of. I applied to MIT. I got in early, and I was done at that point. And then mother-- MIT was just a little expensive, even back in the early 90s it was still expensive. So she wanted to apply to other places and I was done. So we came to loggerheads on this issue. And the compromise was that she went to my computer and modified and printed my statements and filled out the applications for me and I signed them and mailed them. So I got into a bunch of other places, but then when the time came to select schools I had made my preferences very clear. And they eventually conceded that MIT was not such a bad school to go to.

INTERVIEWER: What were your parents' reactions to you going to MIT or your other friends or your advisors-- there's a sense of what MIT should be?

MCLURKIN: What were other people's reactions to me going to MIT? Well you've got the standard mix of encouragement and support and jealousy and disbelief and people who-- I had a bunch of friends on the newspaper and none of them were surprised. They were all very supportive and that was good. Mr. Warasilla of course, was ecstatic and he had no doubts. It was usually positive. I remember the day actually, I remember I came home. It was about that times, so it was about letter time. And there's this letter in the mail box and it couldn't have had more than one piece of paper in it. And I was like, man, this is a really small letter. So I rode my bicycle over my girlfriend's house and we opened it together. And sure enough I'd gotten in. I felt pretty good about it. And I was a little irritated that they'd sent such a small letter for such a big acceptance. But then after that-- this is before internet e-mail-- after that they sent literally a box of papers and documents and things on clubs. Literally I had a box of MIT mailings after that one letter.

INTERVIEWER: What were your initial impressions when you came to MIT and campus? You came in 1990, right? Was there anything that struck you right away about the campus or the students or just the kind of atmosphere in general?

MCLURKIN: What struck me about the campus right away? I don't really remember my first impression of being on campus.

INTERVIEWER: Where did you live?

MCLURKIN: Well, I remember when I first got to campus. I remember my Dad and I were in his old 1970 green Oldsmobile car. I knew one of the kids, one my friends here from a summer program and the car was about three blocks long. So we pulled up and they had a lot of interesting colorful comments about the size and shape and color of the automobile. I remember the pillars-- the Roman pillars on 77. The first stop was the student center for registration material.

You have the standard feelings of trepidation. You walk into this place, it's very imposing, it's very concrete. It does not feel cold. Didn't feel cold. It wasn't particularly inviting, but there was a lot of energy. Still you can feel the energy. You can cut it. Lots of energy. Actually, the trip on the way up, the last probably 40 miles I spent trying to learn how to spell Massachusetts, which was something I figured I ought to know how to do going here.

INTERVIEWER: Where did you end up living once you finally got the orientation and everything? Did you live in a dorm or a fraternity or a--

MCLURKIN: So rush week was fun, lots of fun. Went around and ate a lot of food. And then selected-- so I was the only child and one of the things that I wasn't prepared to deal with his roommates. So East Campus and MacGregor were two of the dorms that had a large percentage of single rooms. So I selected-- what were my preferences? I think Next House , then New House, then MacGregor then East Campus, and then McCormick. Because after East Campus I wasn't interested in living anywhere else. McCormick was a nice dorm. I figured I'd try to live there.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have an initial group of friends or a club or an activity that you kind of initially got drawn into?

MCLURKIN: The first activity I got drawn into on campus. Actually, the first activity that I got drawn into on campus was the Model Railroad Club. I had model trains when I was younger, when I was in high school and I played with them on and off. I had a big layout in the basement that was in various stages of construction and destruction. I went to visit the Tech Model Railroad Club, and one of the guys there, John Purbrick, he's still there. I still have e-mail contact with him, he's still in the area. Turns out he was the first winner of MIT 270, the class that I saw on TV that pulled me into the place. I didn't realize that until 8 years later. But we worked on the train layout. I worked on some trees or something. They wouldn't let me do anything real because I was just a random freshman showing up. And they went to Buzzy's Famous Roast Beef, which is probably the worst roast beef potato joint in all of the universe. Speaking of things nostalgic, I wish I'd gone back before it closed. It was like 1:30 in the morning and Cambridge is all very provincial, everything's closed at 1:30 in the morning. So the only place to eat was Buzzy's.

INTERVIEWER: So that first year you were there you took the normal assortment of freshman classes? 801, 1801, 102, and did you have any challenges getting through all that? You know, as-- did you really take advantage of pass/fail exempt students [INAUDIBLE]?

MCLURKIN: So the first term in 1990, the first year was pass/fail. And I took kind of a standard class with a bit of tactical rearrangement. Took 1801, 6001, 801X and 3091 my first term. And I took 001 the first term because from what I heard from the upperclassmen the classes are smaller, classes are a little easier and that would let me get through the core EECS curriculum a term ahead. That would give me a little more flexibility with the things at the back.

So I took some advice from my classmates and my first term actually wasn't so bad. My high school prepared me well to come to MIT. And I had the ego. Got through the first term with all passes. I felt pretty good about myself. Second term it got quite a bit harder, and I hadn't really noticed that it was getting harder in a nonlinear fashion. My third term, was first term sophomore year was when the real rude awakenings came because all the classes now I had not seen any of the material. And the classes got significantly harder and my studies skills had not kept up to the pace. So that's when I got my first F, my only F. But I got my first F and my first one ever. No, actually I failed health in middle school, but we're not going to worry about that.

I got my first real academic F and that was a real-- thermodynamics 240. 9 o'clock in the morning, which was just bad already. Had no idea a thing I was talking about. I earned that F.

INTERVIEWER: Did you start off right away in EECS, or did you--

MCLURKIN: Oh yeah. Well, actually so why did I pick my major? Did I start off right away in EECS? I knew that I wanted to do something robots. I'd already built some robots in high school. I wanted to get somewhere with the intersection of mechanical engineering, course 2-- 6 1 or 6 3. And I couldn't figure out between the two of them. So I rationalized that okay, I can learn mechanical engineering by building stuff. I can learn all I need about-- this is the mind of an 18-year-old. I can learn everything I need to know about mechanical engineering by building stuff. And I can already write software, I don't need to learn how to write software. But I'm never going to understand how a radar transmitter works until I take some electrical engineering classes because I don't understand really how these transistors are anything. I don't understand how these capacitors and resistors are doing their stuff. I know that I need a resistor here with the base, the transistor-- these are things I learned in high school through little books from Radio Shack. So I decided to go with electrical engineering.

I later on realized that no, you can't learn computer science and you can't learn mechanical engineering by doing EECS classes. So I ended up with electrical engineering, with a minor in mechanical engineering. So 61 with a minor in two.

INTERVIEWER: Did you work on any projects or UROPs in your first two years here?

MCLURKIN: So my first UROP experience was not building robots. My parents actually made me leave all my robots at home and they made me leave my bike at home too because they wanted me to really focus on studying. They were concerned that I'd get to MIT and spend all my time playing and not doing enough work. There was some wisdom in their plan, but I needed the bicycle. That came up a few weeks later and then the robot came up after Christmas, so second term. But my first UROP was my second term freshman year working on a massively parallel supercomputer. It was the J-machine, the Jelly bean machine. Professor William Dally was the guy running that. And 65,00 nodes. Well, 65,536 or 535 nodes. And my job was to build an ISO card that would fit into a computer that would keep the clock deskewed to less than-- I think something like 6 nanoseconds they wanted. And my God, it was boring. It was just so mind-numbingly dull. I got the card about 70 percent done and I did what every irresponsible undergrad does-- I vanished. And eventually I got some e-mails from the guys, like what's going on? And I had to come to grips that I don't want to do this UROP anymore. So I handed off all my documentation. I apologized. I was horribly, horribly embarrassed because this is not what you're supposed to do. And they were very like you know, okay cool. They weren't like okay cool. They were disappointed and discouraged, but far less irritated than I thought they would be. Now that I've supervised several UROPs I recognize I fit very nicely into the category of the disappearing UROP and you can only get about so upset because that's what UROPs tend to do sometimes.

My second UROP though was in the Mobile Lab with Rodney Brooks. And my direct supervisor was Anita Flynn. And that started the beginning of everything for me. So I was in the lab working on real robots. I had my robots now from home. And my first term there they said-- she invited me in, she said, you can have a great time, but we can't pay you anything. I was like, well, can I have free parts? Yeah, sure you can have parts. I'm like, great. So I finished my robots, then I started working on other projects they had in the lab. That started the beginning of my entire career with robotics. Real robotics, real research, really being in the lab. And I stayed in that lab for the next four years.

INTERVIEWER: And then I guess going back to Rodney Brooks, how well did you get to know him? Do you have any kind of famous or memorable stories about an interaction or just passing him in the hallways or a meeting?

MCLURKIN: I know Rod well. He's encouraging me to get out of here now. So, memorable interactions with Rod.

The thing with Rod is that he, at the time I met him, he was in the peak of his insane global professor doing everything phase. I think he had just become the associate director of the lab and he was really still very much championing his subsumption style reactive programming. And everyone else be damned and we're going to do it-- this is how we're doing it, and we have to build a compiler to write this code. And we have to do things like this and don't want to say militant, but very clear on his way to do things. He's softened up so much now that he's gotten older. But I do remember, actually one of my first conversations with him. At home I had built this robot and I had it running around and in order for me to write software for my robot I had to build an assembler. So I could type assembly language code into my IBM computer, cross compile it to my 6502, which is on the robot and then compile it, burn that to the robot's memory. And I didn't actually know the difference between a compiler and assembler. I thought I had written the compiler. I had actually written the assembler.

I was saying something about something and I mentioned I'd written the compiler for my robot, and he stopped dead in his tracks, you've written the compiler? You're a freshman, you've written a compiler? And I was like, well yeah, it wasn't that hard. I just kind of you know, kind of tip top. And after we'd gotten in a discussion I learned I'd written the assembler. I learned that actually, it's not that hard. He was no longer impressed at all. That was my first real interaction with Rod, but he subsequently became more impressed later. Later on in the four years I spent working with him.

INTERVIEWER: So your junior/senior year, did you have any summer jobs in between years or were you doing research here on campus? And then leading into that, did that affect any kind of classes that you took in your junior and senior year?

MCLURKIN: So what were my internships like? So my freshman year I went to Andersen Consulting, which was and still-- Andersen Consulting's now Accenture. Who knows what it will be when this video's shown. It really reaffirmed my knowledge that fancy suits do not make good engineers. The guys there had lots of nice looking suits, there wasn't a lot of good technology there. So I decided that technical consulting wasn't in my path. Came back to MIT, spent the next summer-- spent the next two summers here, actually, in the lab building good robots, working with Anita and Rod, having a very good learning experience. Realizing I only had one summer left took an internship at General Motors in Dayton, Ohio. And turned out to be actually, a really good summer. Worked a little bit on their electrical vehicle, but saw-- you don't know what a real company looks like until you're in a real company. And staying inside of the world's biggest car manufacturer was good. And I spent the summer-- they didn't have enough for me to do, so I spend most of the summer rewriting actually, the code for my robots. It was a good summer.

INTERVIEWER: What classes did you take senior year, junior year? And, are they still around or are those professors--

MCLURKIN: Oh, classes, classes, classes. So I don't remember a lot of my academics from --

INTERVIEWER: Did they have digital death or analog death back then?

MCLURKIN: Oh yeah. No, Digital Death Lab, 611. Actually, 611-- I think was a shame. I should have had an A in that class. But that was a bad term. I broke my leg, got the flu, scratched my esophagus, my girlfriend dumped me. It was just all bad a term. I lost something like 10 pounds in like 3 weeks with the combination of flu and not being able to eat anything. Couldn't walk around, leg broken. So I actually don't remember much of junior year. I think I blocked it. I think it's repressed. But I do remember 4301. So there are a whole bunch of courses that stood out. Digital Death Lab wasn't nearly the death it should have been for me because I had lots of experience. But there are a few classes-- oh, let's see. Let's do the negatives first. 6013, Electrical Statics and Energy. Professor Hermann Haus. Man, just painful. Painful. Because you'd be sitting there with 15 pages of equations and you're still on problem 2. Just a painful class. What else was painful?

No, that was the worst. That was the class where it should have been crystal clear to me that I wasn't going to be an electrical engineer when I grew up. That wasn't a hint, that was a sledgehammer to the side of the head. But being as stubborn as I am I didn't take the warning. So on the bright side 4301, Introduction to Visual Arts. I took that class because I had to take-- this is an example of the HASS, the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

So MIT, they can't let you come in and graduate being completely off balance. You have to take something to center yourself a little bit. Some kind of history or writing, something with some flowers. So I decided to take art because it seemed the less painful, other than Modern history or some kind of literature thing where you have to read books or something. So at least art class you get to build stuff. I didn't really take it seriously, and I wasn't doing really well. And the TA was really riding my tail. She was really trying to get me to think about what I was doing, think about the aesthetics and I-- then the people in the class, they'd build this-- they'd just built utter crap. And then just bullshit about it. And it was terrible. And about a third of the way through I started to really-- I'd decided to you know what? Let me try to do this because I think-- I guess I felt there was something there. I felt that there was something there and I really wanted to try to do it and really tried to pay attention and to listen to think about the aesthetics. And think about the design of what I was doing and think about why she-- Maggie Orth-- why she wasn't happy with what I was doing. It became a challenge to put together creative and interesting balance aesthetics pieces. And they had different things every week.

We had to do a digital lab, so that was one I really-- that was the turnaround. So I took Calvin and Hobbes, which was a big phenomenon back then in the early 90s. And scanned them in and blew Calvin up to full size, so Calvin was about this tall. And this is before I had access to a plotter. So this is all printed on my little ink jet and taped together. And I made a whole big mural-- hundreds of pages printed out, taped together to make Calvin real size. To have a Calvin to be real sized. And I was talking about how-- because I was interested in seeing Calvin full size. That was the real connection.

The class turned out to be really positive and really influenced all my engineering and everything I've done since then in terms of thinking about the aesthetics of the design of my systems. A very positive class. The other real highlight of my undergrad career was Professor Bose's class: acoustics. And I took that because I was scared of 6014, which is the electrodynamics. After my experience with 6013 I was not interested in 6014. Again, the hint I was in the wrong major. At any rate, Bose is a fabulous teacher, fabulous instructor. And he's one of the few teachers I've had while I was at the Institute. Lots of lectures, lots of instructors, lots of professors, very few teachers.

And he would teach and he had-- the first class he talked about something. He asked us a question about something and he stops and he asks, what is the-- what did he ask? We were talking about lumped parameter models and how to model a system, an acoustic system. And we were talking about different types of systems. He asked what is an energy storage element? What's an energy storage element in a thermal system? I remember the question. Yeah, what is an energy storage element in a thermal system? And he was writing on the blackboard and the professor asked a question in class, whatever, you just write and you wait, and eventually someone's going to say something. And he stopped and he didn't say anything. He didn't do anything until someone answered the question.

And it was uncanny because he would stop-- he stopped and then he looked. He stopped writing and he looked around and no one said anything. He turned around and stopped and leaned against the board and then we all started looking at each other because we didn't understand what was happening. The professor actually stopped. He wanted an answer to this question? And then a hand went up, another hand went up, and he did that about four or five more times that term. He would just stop the whole class until he got an answer to the question. Very effective.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever have a chance to take Professor Edgerton's class- [INAUDIBLE]?

MCLURKIN: I didn't. One of the saddest things about arriving to MIT in 1990 was that Professor Edgerton passed away right before I got there. Yeah, I wish I'd been able to overlap with him. That absolutely would have been a class I would have taken. Especially if I had known that I only had a year to take it.

INTERVIEWER: So your senior thesis, you designed some robots and you had had some parties to assemble robots. So maybe you can describe--

MCLURKIN: So my senior thesis is one of the-- I do believe because I've only happened to be at the MIT Mobile Lab with Rod and Anita at that time. I wanted to build a community of ant robots. Wanted to build robots that could act like ants, really be like ants. And I was too young to recognize that this was just a phenomenally difficult-- this is a lifelong research goal. At any rate, so ignorance is bliss. So I was running around trying to get these robots built and I had a bunch of parts-- I got parts made. I had built some prototypes. I had a good, solid design. So then I recruited as many people as I could get to help me assemble my robots. I had ant day parties. I bought a bunch of pizza. And I had teams of friends in the machine shop pounding out little handmade gear- boxes and then, people soldering circuit boards and it was a lot of fun. We got 21 robot parts bodies assembled and I was able to build 21 working robots about 3 weeks later.

So convergence of lots of people with similar interests. Lots of excitement, lots of energy. And all from the suggestion of Anita. Anita was masterful at organizing people. And her thing was, you know, if you want to get these robots built just send an e-mail, put some posters up, and talk to people. Don't just send e-mails. Go and actually talk to them face to face. Invite them to come build robots. And everyone likes to build robots. This is Anita Flynn of course, and she's the mistress of robotics. She can't understand why anyone would not ever want to come build a robot. And turned out that people would come build robots. So we built robots.

INTERVIEWER: You took 270, right? How did you do in the competition?

MCLURKIN: So 270, the reason I came to MIT-- in fact, actually I had to change majors because I was electrical engineering. I tried to take it in my sophomore year, they wouldn't let anybody in. So I got crafty, I changed majors to mechanical engineering. I changed majors to mechanical engineering for a year and then I couldn't get bumped out of class. I was a junior, had seniority and I was a MechE, so I was guaranteed to get to the class. I took the class, and unfortunately I spent a lot of time designing and thinking and cogitating and CAADing not enough time building, and certainly not enough time practicing. So my machine was okay. I would have probably made it to the final eight or so had I had some time driving it. As it was I got to the- think it was the third round. And then--

INTERVIEWER: What was the competition that year?

MCLURKIN: The competition that year was to collect cans. It was a recycle competition, so you had to collect bottles, cans, and let's see-- tin cans, plastic bottles, and some other kind of recyclable thing. And deposit them into-- oh, aluminum cans. I'm sorry, tin cans, aluminum cans, plastic bottles and put them in their respective recycle bins. This is '92, you know recycling was new in '92. So I had this machine that had little grippers on the front, and it had a bucket, and had a little dump telescope thing. I finally decided that was too complicated. And the way it failed, the reason I lost-- because I actually would have won the competition that I lost. The grippers expanded and because I hadn't enough time practicing I drove it into the side of the wall. The grippers overextended, got caught in the wheel, the machine was jammed. And the machine that actually won-- all the ones that were in the finals were very simple, very elegant designs.

I was excited to be there. I still have my shirt and I plan to wear it at my thesis defense. But the real lesson I learned was simplicity and design. Simplicity and testing, simplicity testing. Pound, pound, simple, pound, pound simple, pound.

INTERVIEWER: So after you graduate from MIT you took a position at the AI Lab, right? So what were you doing then?

MCLURKIN: So I left MIT, I graduated in '95 and took on a researcher-- engineering scientist, whatever, position in the AI Lab working with Rod for two years. And that was kind of fun. Kind of. So I was continuing the work with ant robots. I was doing various-- so I was working as this [INAUDIBLE] in Rod's group. So I built these little cameras things and I helped a bunch of grad students with their robots and their thesis. I built some circuits for Cog. I felt that my growth wasn't-- I wasn't learning, wasn't doing anything new. I was outputting. I mean, I was. I was outputting, I was entering work. I was working. It was a job.

INTERVIEWER: Was this in building 20 or was it somewhere else?

MCLURKIN: So the job was in Tech Square. It was in building NE43 at the time, Tech Square before they built this big, giant, crazy architecture that we live in now, the Stata Center. You know, boring square building with boring walls and hissing architecture. And it had that smell. It turns out actually all the building in campus have different smells. If you walk the different buildings-- I dare say you could blindfold me and I could pick out-- Tech Square I could pick out Lobby 7, I could pick out the basement of 66. I mean, there are a bunch of places that I could identify by smell alone.

INTERVIEWER: Between 1990 and you left MIT in 1997, how have you seen campus change, the student body change, the whole atmosphere?

MCLURKIN: So what's changed? Obviously, MIT is building everything in sight. They've got about 90 or 100 new buildings. I don't know how many buildings they've got. I think it's about four new buildings on campus. It's hard for me to really detect changes because I've been in and around the Institute. You know, I didn't really have a good, clean break. I'm looking forward to getting some distance and some years and coming back and seeing how new and beautiful and wonderful. How everything smells like roses. Right now I just want to graduate.

INTERVIEWER: Now you participated in Interphase and MITES, and you're a mentor, a teacher in these programs. How did you get into that? Was it through the community you were living with or was it just an interest that you had, or something going back to high school?

MCLURKIN: Interphase was a program for underrepresented minority freshman that come to MIT and essentially get abused for the summer. So that they can adjust their expectations. And to get them some material, so that they wouldn't be shocked by the material they would see freshman year. But the whole point of the program really is about mental adjusting, mental preparation for what is about to be expected of you. So that when you come through MIT you know what level of output you need to produce.

I'd given a few physics review sessions for underclassmen, for freshman when I was a senior in my fifth year. And it was fun, I enjoy teaching. So I decided that when I was staff, let me go ahead and teach physics for the summer. Had a great time. Came back the next year and the next year. So I taught three years of physics. And then went to Berkeley and came back and I taught one more year. Actually, when I was staff at iRobot. So I worked out my schedule so that I could still maintain a full-time job and get to MIT three days a week to teach physics. It was a lot of fun and it really opened my eyes to teaching. Something now that I do a lot more of.

After Interphase, after I came back to MIT as a grad student then I was one of the founding instructors in the SEED program, which is to pull underrepresented minority students from local community-- high school students. Start with them in ninth grade and stay with them all the way until they graduate. I've got a real love of teaching and it's something that I want to continue doing.

INTERVIEWER: After you were working in the AI Lab you left for Berkeley to get a Master's. Was there a reason that pulled you to Berkeley that you didn't want to get a Master's at MIT?

MCLURKIN: So I left AI Lab. Why'd I leave MIT? '97. I've been here now for 7 years. It was time to be somewhere else. I was sick and tired of what I was doing. I was sick and tired of building robots. I was sick and tired of being in the lab. I was sick and tired of-- I felt like I was playing with my toys. I wasn't doing any real work. I wasn't producing anything, wasn't learning anything. It was time for something different. UC Berkeley was an exciting place to be. They had a real, very good, biology department. And I thought that maybe I even wanted to be a biologist when I grew up. But certainly at the time, I wanted to build a dragonfly. I wanted to build a small flying robot that really had some good aerodynamics and that could get around and do some stuff. And learned a lot of important lessens in that quest. So I went to Berkley for electrical engineering.

One of the most important things I learned at UC Berkeley wasn't electrical engineering, it was that I don't want to be an electrical engineer. I actually don't like electrical engineering. What I really wanted to do with the dragonfly was write the software that made it fly around. And upon more introspection I realized that what I wanted to do was essentially what I had already been doing, writing software for large numbers of little critters. So my Master's thesis at Berkeley was essentially programs for center networks. Algorithms for center networks. It was a really poor computer science master's thesis written by an electrical engineer.

INTERVIEWER: What was the Bay Area like? You're right there in the middle of the dot- com boom --

MCLURKIN: Yeah, so the Bay Area-- it was late 90s. I had a friend of mine who was doing a startup. I did some consulting, had a little bit of cash in my pocket. Everyone had all this money. People were leaving school left and right to do startups. It was exciting being there. And the Bay Area on a bad day, I mean, just the worst day ever in San Francisco is so nice. I'd very much like to end up somewhere back there. So my father lives in LA. I've got family in LA and getting up to San Fran, getting back in the Bay Area would be very exciting.

INTERVIEWER: So you come back to MIT in 2000. Is there a reason you decide that, you know, did Berkeley reenergize you that this is you wanted to do? Was it working? Any work experience you had in the interim there?

MCLURKIN: So the lessons learned at Berkeley, why come back to MIT? The big realization was that I don't like electrical engineering. I don't want to get a PhD in electrical engineering. I've got to stop this degree process before it gets out of control. So I collected the Master's and then the decision to leave Berkeley was-- you know one of the things that MIT is very special in its personality. The personality of this place and the creativity and the energy, the intellectual energy, and not the academic output. The intellectual energy, all the different things that are happening on this campus at any given time, very, very exciting. Lots of energy and lots of creativity. Lots of silliness, lots of humor. And a deep culture of silliness and humor. And that purveyed everything and it pops up in the most random places. Just walking through this building they'll be a guy who has a computer drum machine, audio acoustic synthesizer, interactive thing setup in a big-- I mean, literally it was in a big plywood box. It was an eight foot tall plywood box with some screens on it. All kinds of crazy things happen.

I remember my freshman year, I'd been on campus about two weeks and this guy was walking through the student center courtyard outside. I'm holding what from 50 yards away looked to be a hydrofoil. So I ran over to the guy and said, is this a hydrofoil-- oh I can't remember. Hydrofoil, yeah. Is this a hydrofoil you've got here? It looks like one. Looks like a bicycle- powered hydrofoil. I said, yes it is a bicycle- powered hydrofoil. And that's the kind of thing that you can just carry around at this campus. And I was the only person of course who went over to him and talked to him. I was the only person who went over to talk to him. And we talked about this human- powered hydrofoil and how it was cool and different and it was very fast and he had it on the Charles and it rides above the chop. We had this whole conversation about this thing that he was creating on campus. And that's what makes this place so special, is all that stuff like that.

INTERVIEWER: So, at this stage-- how old were you when you decided you wanted to go back and pursue a PhD?

MCLURKIN: So 2000, I am 28-years-old. Yeah, so I decided I need a PhD. I decided that I need a PhD in computer science. And by the way, the real story-- you want to know the truth? The truth was that I had no plans. I did know that I didn't want a PhD in electrical engineering. My girlfriend at the time was in Harvard Med School, so we came back here. She came back here to finish up her Med degree. So I figured, okay, fine. I'll come back to Boston. I'm not staying here. And I then got a job at iRobot. I didn't work with Rod, but working on the SWARM project. Which was just a gift wrapped PhD, essentially. They had just gotten this money to do the SWARM project. They had put me in the proposal as someone who could potentially manage this thing, unbeknownst to me. And then they asked me to come at iRobot to see if I'd be interested in running this thing. What do I know about running a project?

Turns out I don't know anything about project management. But trial by fire, at iRobot I got-- the engineers said that I was not bad, they said at managing. But about a year into that project it was clear that I was sitting on top of a PhD thesis. And I applied to MIT. I got in and I was going to do my thesis now on the algorithms for the swarms or robots. So essentially, through no planning of my own I ended up at iRobot with enough government money to build 112 little robots and a charter to do research that would eventually turn into my thesis. I couldn't have planned it any better. In fact, I suspect had I tried to plan it I would have screwed it up.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that your age now is going to factor-- do you have any concerns that your age now is going to affect the plans you want to do with the PhD when you finally get out? The fact that you're older than some faculty or anything like that?

MCLURKIN: So this is something-- something that concerns me is the fact that I'm getting gray and old and all that stuff. And I've been told over and over and over again that it's not a problem. However, it is the case that if you look at the number of terms I've been a grad student in this program you can squint your eyes and say technically I'm not late. Technically this is my seventh term. Technically the average is about- I'm sorry, this is my 13th term. Technically the average is about 12 terms to get a PhD. But then you take into account that I already had a master's in electrical engineering. I already had two years of work experience. I already had another year at MIT getting the minor. I am sick and tired of being in school. So even if I'm not too old to go get a job as a professor, which is the plan, I am certainly too old to be in school.