By Elise Gao ’26

A single donation: it’s like the start of an avalanche; this sort of net good is more than the sum of its individual parts.”

Chris Fritz ’13

Chris Fritz ’13 is pursuing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University, but before that, Fritz’s journey began as a day student attending Mercersburg Academy, where financial aid played a key role in shaping his academic and professional trajectories. 

“It kick-started my intellectual journey in the sense that I really began to grow as an individual capable of critical thinking,” Fritz said.

For the well-established local, Mercersburg Academy was an obvious choice for secondary education. 

“My family is actually made up of generations of farmers from the local area,” Fritz explained. “The first Fritz came in the 1700s–made their way to nearby Mercersburg–and we’ve just been farmers ever since.” 

While living in proximity to the Academy increased his desire to attend the prestigious prep school, the high tuition fees proved to be an obstacle.

“I know that my experience was only possible through the generosity of donors and others,” Fritz acknowledged. “I used the grant money as a recipient–I used it to attend Mercersburg.

“It really set me up for having pretty strong success in my academic work afterward, but also just life in general. I got a good mindset from Mercersburg, both in the classroom and out. I grew a ton as a person there. There’s really so many deep and consequential moments of growth that I got at Mercersburg that I would not have had otherwise, both as an individual, intellectually, but also as a person.”

After graduating from Mercersburg, Fritz continued his academic momentum from undergraduate to graduate school.

“I went to Dickinson College, which is in Carlisle, PA. I studied physics there, while also undertaking some undergraduate engineering studies. Then I graduated and took a year off. I bartended and then applied to grad school, where I went to Stanford for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. I studied brain computer interfaces there under an electrical engineering Ph.D. program, which was a ton of fun.”

Fritz went on to secure a job at Anduril, a leading American defense technology company which develops products for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Currently, he works as an engineer, designing guardrails for robots in the aerospace and defense industries. His job involves blending AI with traditional software, a relatively new field. “I train robots to do smart things in a way that’s reliable, trustworthy, and fully bounded,” said Fritz. “That way, we can make really concrete assertions about the behavior of those robots.”

While always interested in STEM, Fritz never imagined that he’d one day be working with AI. “My Ph.D. program kind of throws you into a lot more math called signal processing. But ultimately it led to being in the AI field, because the cutting edge brain decoders happen to use deep neural networks. AI was kind of what was in vogue, and what the field was pushing toward at the time. So it’s kind of how I got sidestepped into this field. Very, very unusual. But that’s fine. I enjoyed my path. It has been a great journey.”

Fritz credits the beginning of his journey to the help he received. 

“I think financial aid is really key,” Fritz said. “A single donation: it’s like the start of an avalanche, or something like the beginning of a cascade, right? And you kind of never know what the consequences of that will be, but I can tell you that there are consequences. This sort of net good is more than the sum of its individual parts. There’s something cool, and very deep and profound, that happens because of that generosity–at least for me. So I’m very, very grateful.”