The Kern Center was home to varsity hockey goaltender Rock Boynton for 41 games over the course of his four years at MSOE, and he closed out his college experience by giving the spring 2021 commencement speech in the exact same spot.

“Giving the commencement speech in front of my classmates and family was a very special experience for me, one which I will cherish the rest of my life,” said Boynton. “It was even more meaningful that I delivered it in the space in which I spent the majority of my time as a goaltender on the hockey team. I was honored to share a few things I find important in life and hope the members of the audience were able to take something away from it.”

Boynton, a Lomita, California native, graduated in May 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a passion for electronics.

“As a kid I loved tinkering with electronics and toys and was especially interested in the types of devices that had embedded computers in them. As I grew up, I knew I wanted to study how hardware and software can combine to create some really cool stuff!”

Today Boynton is elbow deep in cool stuff at Tesla where he works as a firmware engineer on the Supercharging team. He is responsible for developing new features for the superchargers as well as fixing bugs or making small improvements to the charging experience for customers. His career goals for the near term are to lead the development of a new feature or project. Boynton explained his MSOE education is critical to his job at Tesla. “Every day I use some of the tools we learned about in school and use the concepts and best-practices I studied to write efficient and robust code in a variety of operating systems.

Although his time at MSOE was action packed balancing hockey, clubs and an intense academic workload, it shaped him into a well prepared, confident employee.

“It all pays off when you are in interviews with your dream job and the information you have studied so hard for is right with you. Every day it is rewarding to be working on challenging problems and feeling comfortable and confident because we have already solved so many difficult problems at MSOE.”

One of Boynton’s favorite parts about MSOE was “the incredibly knowledgeable professors who were able to teach in small class sizes, allowing students to learn in a very welcoming environment.” As a senior, he also founded MSOE’s chapter of Google Developer Student Club and served as the lead/vice president.

In his free time, Boynton enjoys practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, hiking, reading, listening to music, watching TV and cooking and baking. He even dedicates his Sundays to meal prepping for the whole week to save time, money and cook healthy meals.