First-year Edan Bash: From building rockets to EECS at Berkeley

Edan Bash, 18, hopes to one day work on a software team at an aerospace company, like NASA or SpaceX. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)

“I wanted to get away from home — I grew up in Glendale, about 20 minutes outside of L.A. Berkeley’s far enough, it’s about six hours, but I still like the California weather. And it has a great program, EECS, which is electrical engineering and computer sciences. It’s probably one of the best programs in the country, so it seemed like the best place to be.

I started liking software in high school, and I also really like hardware — I like the interaction between the two. In high school, I was on the robotics team. I did a few internships in high school. I did a program at JPL Space Academy, where you build a rocket from spare parts on a team. It’s pretty fun. At one of the internships, we went to Portugal and worked with drones.

I’m really looking forward to joining the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles team at Berkeley, where they build their own UAVs and drones and work with image processing and stuff like that. In the future, I’d probably like to work on a software team at an aerospace company, like NASA or SpaceX.

I have a twin sister who also goes here, so we’re kind of together in this. We’re pretty different, so I was kind of surprised that we decided to go to the same school. It’s nice having her here. You always have somebody to go to, you know, if you’re in trouble or you need someone to talk to. It’s pretty cool.”