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In undergrad, Tom Wright became interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence as a statistics and computer science major. His internships in the industry led to a research opportunity at the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (Mila), where he explored the intersection of machine learning and optimization. MIT Sloan’s Master of Business Analytics program was a natural fit in his career trajectory as “it balances optimization and machine learning.”
Tom immersed himself in all the opportunities that MIT Sloan has to offer like being elected as the MBAn Class President, is a member of the Sloan Senate and its Health and Wellness Committee, and also works as a research assistant with MIT’s Operations Research Center.
Looking to the future, he hopes to work in spaces that are meaningful to him, where he can make positive economic and social impacts.
A Day with Tom
9:00 am
I often start my day by grabbing a coffee at the Martin Trust Center. I found out about it from an MBAn alumnus (shoutout to Dev). They often have snacks, and there’s a ping-pong table there. It’s right across from E-51 and nearby E-62, so very close to my home base as a Sloan student.
9:30 am
I’m meeting with two other MBAn students, Vassili Chesterkine and Paul Theron, for our Sensorimotor Learning class project. We were applying reinforcement learning techniques to unit commitment—a massive mixed-integer optimization problem found in power systems research. We developed a method called Robust Guided Forest Search.
10:00 am
We walked out with a sense of excitement after a successful meeting.
11:00 am
Off to my first class of the day, Sensorimotor Learning with Professor Pulkit Agrawal. I think reinforcement learning is an interesting paradigm. It’s very different from more classical machine learning methods like supervised learning. It’s an interesting way to tackle and model problems.
11:00 am
Reinforcement learning is definitely not easy. It takes a lot to properly build environments and create stable models.
11:25 am
I couldn’t stay for the entire class as I had a Senate meeting, but the lectures are recorded, and given the time of the year, many students opt for watching the recordings. As MBAn Class President, I represent MBAn students on the Sloan Senate. This has been a really nice way to interact with other members of the Sloan community—the other programs, staff, faculty, and administration.
11:30 am
This day was a bit out of the norm. Usually, this is when we would generally have our usual meeting. On that day, we met briefly but had to cut things short for the annual Senate photoshoot. I’m also a member of the Health and Wellness Committee within the Sloan Senate. I thought it would be a great opportunity to contribute to and support the entire Sloan community which has done so much for me.
12:15 pm
The photographer caught me juggling more than my responsibilities as you can see.
12:30 pm
I’m having lunch with the MBAn Class Vice President Brittany Nguyen.
1:00 pm
After lunch, I’m meeting with Marco Antonioli who is my capstone project partner. The MBAn program has a capstone project, which is like our internship throughout the summer, but we also commit 10 hours per week during the spring semester. Here, Marco and I are doing some final prep and then having our meeting with our capstone company, HANDLE Global. They deal with healthcare system capital asset analytics and are a great group of people. Marco is also one of my closest friends in the program and given we had worked together on a project in the fall, we knew we would make a good team for the capstone.
2:15 pm
After the capstone project meeting, we had some downtime so we headed to the Martin Trust Center. Whenever we get the chance, we’ll take a break to play ping-pong. Honestly, I think ping-pong is part of how we became such good friends. We try to play at least three times a week.
2:20 pm
Marco almost always won at the start of the year, but I’d say it’s getting closer to 50/50 now. It’s a good thing he isn’t writing this, as I’m sure he would beg to differ (sorry, Marco!). We get pretty competitive at the table, but other than that we’re good pals. Maybe the competition makes us an even stronger team.
2:30 pm
My last class of the day is Integer Optimization with Professor Alexandre Jacquillat, who is also my research supervisor.
2:45 pm
It’s a very difficult class, but I really like it (no bias). I think it’s valuable and a cool class because you’re not just working on the modeling side of things, but also learning about algorithms that make models scale to realistic settings.
