Alexander Boeglin ’03: A Journey from Engineering to Business With a Stop at Harvard In Between By Rebecca Greenberg ‘14 For Alexander Boeglin ’03, who graduated from Harvard Business School (HBS) this May, passions for engineering, business and learning in general can be traced to the teachers and colleagues he has met throughout his life. A native of North Kingston and a competitive high school icedancer, Boeglin graduated a year early from Wheeler to pursue an electrical engineering degree at the University of Rhode Island. What made him so ready to leave the nest? With solid foundations in science, math, and even writing and art, Boeglin couldn’t help but feel ready. For one, the “math curriculum was just great”, and Boeglin enjoyed working with faculty member George Lewis. Science classes were just as rigorous and hands-on. Former teacher Tara Weinstein, a “quirky Canadian,” started her engineering classes with a cool high-tech online system, which opened the door to the very passion he later pursued at URI. Boeglin’s honors physics class, a “college-level commitment” made him feel like he was in “the real thing”. APES was just as memorable: Otter was always telling hilarious stories, and the day he dressed up as a cat in black spandex for the environmental science project Cats of Borneo — an image printed indelibly in every APES veteran’s mind — is still vivid in Boeglin’s. (The only anecdote that could rival the Otter memory: the day Mr. Perkins mixed a strange concoction that ended up exploding into his hands.) In reality, though, Boeglin left Wheeler with more than great science and math lessons and a couple of chuckles under his belt. Wheeler also led to his mastery of subjects he didn’t always love. If Boeglin “was pretty bad at English” he grew fond of the English department’s “awesome teachers” and learned to master important writing techniques, such as clarity of syntax, which would help him the rest of his career. Indeed, writing became for Boeglin one of the “unavoidable facts of life” that followed him as he worked in the sciences: in college, it took the form of labs and scientific papers—both of which required clear communication to the reader in addition to well-written sentences. Finally, his background in writing became more and more indispensable as the years passed—as anyone could guess, his thesis included “tons of writing.”
The arts were also memorable for Boeglin. He especially enjoyed performing with his guitar ensemble class at the Holiday Festival and still “picking up a guitar every now and then.” So leave all of this for electrical engineering? First, Boeglin asserts, “electrical engineering is not just about what makes your light bulb turn on.” Indeed, he was drawn to this type of engineering due to its rich and broad science and math content: it explores all elements that electricity touches--such as telephones, microphones, internet, circuits--and even holds the secret to the Facebook face recognition mechanism. After a master’s in electrical engineering from Brown, Boeglin went to work for Raytheon where he worked on sonar and radar systems, including one on Cape Cod. His favorite project as an engineer, however, was the year he moved to Arizona to conduct research on missiles, which encompassed so much international relations work and world history background that he started to wish he had “taken AP US history class.” In Arizona, Boeglin and his close-knit team worked on improving missile development. Important research questions they tackled included: “Do countries need a defense system? If so, how would a missile from one country differ from that of another? It was at Raytheon that Boeglin realized he “knew nothing about finance.” He felt himself intrigued enough he ultimately decided to pursue a business career and applied to the Business School at Harvard. Despite Boeglin’s change of career, he still values immensely the experience he acquired as an engineer. When asked if he has any regrets about switching gears, the answer, however, is no. And yet there still are “a couple things he could have done” that would sure have eased the path to his current situation. The most obvious one, according to Boeglin, would have been talking to people about their experiences, which would have given him “a Now & Then @ Wheeler
path to follow”. To this end, Boeglin often takes part in Wheeler’s Alumni Roundtable to share advice with students. Boeglin clearly remembers being on the other end of the table and this opportunity always helps him “provide some light” on the vagaries of a career path in addition to the importance of taking classes “outside [one’s] major”. Boeglin often wishes he had taken more Alumni humanities classes—not Profile just for his resume, but for his own learning. Indeed, Boeglin would never have guessed that such things as the Cuban Missile Crisis would ever have come in handy—until he found himself at Raytheon discussing the pros and cons of war weaponry and wishing he had learned more about it. For these reasons, he is a big believer in the general education requirements he encountered at college, the classes of which, such as “History of Jazz” ended up being truly “priceless.” As to how he sees himself ten years from now, Boeglin replies: “definitely not retired.” What the future holds for Boeglin is pretty much anyone’s guess. Perhaps investment banking? What is certain is that wherever fate may lead him, it will include “interesting people, smart people—and hopefully a family.” Boeglin below with Ali O’Malley.
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