Tucson native Makko Defilippo will graduate today with a degree in geological engineering.
The University of Arizona will confer 3,882 degrees altogether.
Defilippo's twin brother, Ravi, graduated this week from Arizona State University. The two graduated from Canyon del Oro High School in 2005.
Defilippo has wanted to become an engineer since he was in elementary school. He's going on to graduate school in Colorado and is engaged to be married in March. He shares some of his college experiences here.
I applied to nine schools for swimming, and U of A was one of my last choices. I applied to mostly Div. II schools, smaller private schools, and had some good opportunities, but nothing was as affordable as the U of A.
So I decided to stay here, and I couldn't be happier about the way it worked out.
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I've been fortunate enough to be on scholarship the whole time.
The swim team here, it turns out, is really good. (He laughs.) So I joined the cycling team and the triathlon team.
I've worked an average 15 hours a week during the semesters and then full time every summer.
Right now I work for a geotechnical consulting company (Call & Nicholas Inc.), and we work on mining projects all over the world.
My sophomore summer I was doing exploration geophysics in Alaska, and then also during the semester here in town I was running a geophysics testing lab.
Pretty neat stuff.
I have an identical twin brother at ASU. It's like the whole "house divided" thing.
Right around Thanksgiving every year we always joke about football.
It's brought us a lot closer, being apart. We see each other at least once every two or three weeks, and we talk every day.
I have no doubt that he's going to be extremely successful. I think that we build off each other a lot.
He wasn't even thinking about going to grad school until I got accepted to grad school and now he's taking his GREs (Graduate Record Examinations).
He went into geology, and he was telling me all these cool things, and I was like, "I want an engineering degree, but I should do geological engineering."
Contact reporter Becky Pallack at bpallack@azstarnet.com or 807-8012.
