Lifting Up Leaders

ROBOTICS STUDENTS EARN AMAZON DAY ONE FELLOWSHIP

This year, two students arrived at ENG as Amazon Day One Fellows. As fellows, students gain mentorship, internship and career opportunities as part of a program launched in 2021 boosting the diversity and quality of the robotics engineering workforce

Asbel Fontanez (ENG’22) and Priscila Rubio (ENG’24) are pursuing master’s degrees in Robotics & Autonomous Systems. Along with a dozen other exceptionally talented fellows across seven universities, they will receive funds covering tuition, living expenses and other costs. Fontanez and Rubio are BU’s first Amazon Day One Fellows, with Amazon committed to supporting two incoming students a year going forward.

Hailing from a range of technical and cultural backgrounds, this year’s cohort includes master’s students in robotics, engineering, computer science and related fields at Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Northeastern, and Worcester Polytechnic

Institute. Amazon Day One Fellows are also offered internships and networking opportunities with fellows and faculty at participating institutions.

Before coming to BU to study electrical engineering, Fontanez was lead programmer for his high school’s robotics team. At ENG, he added a concentration in machine learning, getting a jump on graduate-level robotics courses. He completed his master’s coursework in December and now works a co-op at Amazon Robotics headquarters in North Reading.

Besides becoming the best engineer he can be in the medical robotics field, Fontanez hopes to one day establish a nonprofit centered on STEM education. “One thing I’ve learned is, don’t be greedy with your opportunities. Use them to help others coming up behind you,” he says. “So, students who would never have the chance to mess around with a CNC or a 3D printer because of where they live—I want to give them the opportunity to do that.”

While earning a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, Rubio coauthored a National Institutes of Health study on the activation mechanism of A3 adenosine receptors and also interned at Northrop Grumman, where she helped design mechanical ground support equipment for the Minotaur rocket.

After graduating in 2021, she worked as a mechanical engineer for a medical startup, where she used her budding mechatronics expertise to design, test and extend the capabilities of surgical instruments. Rubio will take part in an Amazon internship this summer and hopes, eventually, to build the next Mars Rover.

“The fellowship program is very powerful because it advances engineers from underrepresented backgrounds,” she says. “I don’t have anybody in my family who’s an engineer—I’m the first. Having the mentorship from Amazon is really going to help me in my career. It opens up so many possibilities.”

Last summer, Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist Tye Brady (ENG’90) met with Fontanez, Rubio and the other Day One fellows during a weeklong summit at the new Amazon building in Boston’s Seaport District, where he explained the origin of the fellowship’s name.

“On your first day of a new job, you’re excited; you’re motivated,” says Rubio. “You’re willing to work and to innovate. So you should approach every day as day one.”

Upon completing their Amazon internships or co-ops, the Day One fellows will likely score job offers within Amazon, but are not required to work there.

“There are no strings attached to this fellowship,” explains Fontanez. “The bigger goal is to create great leaders in this space. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where those leaders end up. As long as they’re better leaders in the space of robotics, then robotics is going to be better overall.”