‘The place I needed to be’
During her free time back in high school, Madeline Salazar was often surrounded by piles of balsa wood in her house in East Los Angeles, sanding down her carefully designed bridges for engineering competitions.“I remember being a real nerd about my bridges; I had this whole rack with all the supplies to make bridges,” she laughs. “It was a mess in my house in those days.”Now a senior at MIT, Salazar always excelled in school: Her parents, who emigrated from Mexico in search of greater opportunity for their family, encouraged her. “Although I’m a first-generation student, my parents really valued education,” Salazar says. “From the moment we started school, there were very high expectations for me and my younger sister.” Last fall, Madeline Salazar and her teammates developed an ocean rescue device called SkyBeacon as part of mechanical engineering course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes). Photo: Allegra Boverman But...