The MIT Alumni Association published an interview with Jennifer Trosper that mentions some of the details of her work at JPL. If you want to know more about a day in the life of an MER Mission Manager, go check it out.

And she mentioned Unified Engineering, the sophomore group of classes in the Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Course XVI, in MIT lingo). Unified is how Aero/Astro teaches most of the fundamentals of engineering. It’s 4 total classes, two each semster of the sophomore year, and it’s notorious at MIT for being one of the most rigorous and demanding course loads. My class got t-shirts at the end of the year that said I survived Unified and on the back was a quote from one of our favorite TAs that said And then the wings fell off. Ah, but looking back with rose-colored glasses, it was great fun.