Twins Double the Engineering Expertise

Mamitha Mathew is 15 minutes older and a little more outgoing than her identical twin sister, Amitha, but you’d be hard-pressed to identify many other differences between the two: They’re both straight-A students, they both enjoy Chinese food, and they like to listen to the same Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam songs.

Each is also scheduled to graduate next month with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from UT Dallas.

“Since mathematics was our favorite subject, we both decided to go for electrical engineering at UT Dallas after graduating from Mesquite High School,” said Amitha. “I’m really happy to have a twin sister who is also majoring in electrical engineering. We’ve taken most of the same engineering classes together, and that really helped us each to maintain a high GPA.”

Born in India, Mamitha and Amitha moved to the U.S. with their parents after completing ninth grade, and they quickly got down to work here, academically speaking. They both graduated from high school in the top 10 percent of their class, they got a head start on their college studies through the Academic Bridge Program at UT Dallas, and they have both repeatedly made the Dean’s List.

They get noticed for other things too, of course, besides their academic accomplishments.

“Whenever we walk around campus together, people come up and ask us, ‘Are you guys twins?’” Mamitha said. But rather than tiring of the question, she added, they’ve found that the resulting conversations led to many of their best friendships at the University.

And they did take a divergence when it came to internships and cooperative education activities, which are important parts of most UT Dallas engineering students’ academic careers. Yes, they both found student positions with NASA, but while Mamitha interned at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Amitha co-opped in space shuttle telecommunications at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and interned at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

Will there be additional divergence now that they’re on the cusp of their professional careers? Not yet. They both will start work full time in September at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, the $4.4 billion unit of Raytheon Co., in McKinney, Texas. And they’re each also interested in pursuing a master’s degree in electrical engineering.