Designing a career, on and off the track, at MIT

You will never catch Krystal Montgomery running to class. Literally. She is that fast.

The MIT senior — a Course 6-3 (Computer Science and Engineering) major and Course 4 (Design) minor — was recently named the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference Women’s Track Athlete of the Week — for the second time. Montgomery ran a national top 10 time in the 800 meters at the Friar Invitational in Providence, Rhode Island, in April. Her time of 2:10.67 was the fastest Division III runner in the field, ranking her eighth nationally. She beat that time with a personal best (2:09.51) at the FIRE Meet hosted by Williams College in early May. 

Montgomery also runs the 400 meters or 800 meters on the relay team; last year, she and her teammates were national champions in the 4x400m race, which helped MIT win its first NCAA Division III Outdoor National Championship. 

Her success running at MIT was hard-fought. After a stellar undergraduate first year and earning a place at the NCAA Division III finals, she suffered an injury at the NCAA Division III Indoor Championships. Unable to compete at the start of her second year, the increasing demands of her coursework and interviewing for internships took a toll.

“Sophomore year was super tough, academically,” says Montgomery. “I think the mental load affected my athletic performance. I was thinking that I would quit after my sophomore year and just focus on school. Then I started dropping times and thought that maybe I could improve if I just stuck it out.”

What Montgomery found was a new way to focus on herself that positively impacted her work on and off the track.

“It’s definitely been a journey of learning how to be more mentally tough throughout the last four years,” she says. “I think that has kind of helped both my academic and athletic performances. My junior year was great. I just kept pushing myself and continued to drop my times. I kind of learned how to balance my life. I prioritized sleeping and eating and tried not to be too stressed about schoolwork so I could lock in on race day.”

Supporting creative energy

Montgomery says she was a “pretty crafty person” before attending MIT. The former president of her high school’s chapter of Girls Who Code, she knew she was going to major in computer science. It was her love for building, making, and creating that led her to explore design courses. In her first year, Montgomery took her first design class 4.021 (Design Studio: How to Design), with Paul Pettigrew. 

“That was an amazing experience because I got to use the workshops and the labs in the architecture department,” she says. “It was just crazy to have all these materials at my fingertips that I could build with. I learned how to laser cut; spray paint; powder coat; and cut metal, wood, and fabric. I found it all really interesting, and what I made encouraged me to take more of these classes.”

Montgomery says she realized that pursuing her interest in design while majoring in computer science would allow her to foster her “creative energy” throughout her time at MIT.

In her junior year, Montgomery took class 4.031 (Design Studio: Objects and Interaction) with associate professor of the practice in architecture Marcelo Coelho. She enjoyed it so much she took another of Coelho’s courses, 4.043 (Design Studio: Interaction Intelligence) — twice.

The course provides a foundation in technical skills such as physical prototyping, coding, collecting data, and deploying neural network models. The end result is developing interactive prototypes that can be deployed and experienced by real users. Montgomery enjoyed the process of working with a new group of classmates and partnering to create a prototype in each class. 

“[Coelho’s] classes have been a great combination of designing a physical object and learning how to code, which brought in my computer science background,” says Montgomery. “It gave me the opportunity to combine both fields creatively.”

Moving forward

Montgomery says she hasn’t fully wrapped her head around the fact that her time at MIT is ending. It’s all been good: friends, clubs, courses. 

“My last two years, I chose to focus on memories instead of being stressed over a lot of things,” she says. “I feel like I chose each of the things I did intentionally, so I put my time in things that I’ll carry with me past college.”

Before Commencement, Montgomery will join her teammates in her final meet: the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships. At last year’s championships, Montgomery and her teammates took first place in the women’s 4x400m relay. 

After Commencement, Montgomery will move to Austin, Texas to work as a software developer at Apple, and she will keep competing in track as an unattached athlete, potentially transitioning to marathons later in her career. 

“I’ve seen a lot of post-grads from MIT continue to train and compete in track meets and perform even better than they did in college,” says Montgomery. “I don’t know when I’ll make the switch to longer-distance running. For now, the sweet spot is the 800 meters.”