Written by Staff Writer at CNN
Elmira Sethi was a 23-year-old graduate student at MIT at the beginning of 1993 when she received the invitation of a lifetime.
A woman’s golf group was bringing Nancy Lopez and Lloyd Mangrum to MIT to talk with and get advice from a 26-year-old student studying biometrics in the gender laboratory at the university.
Back then, women were excluded from male professional sports leagues, not to mention the golfers themselves.
Sethi’s job was to use biometrics technology to study themselves before the visitors arrived and study their golf swing afterwards. The machines she used didn’t recognize a person or the facts they told her.
Yet Sethi’s qualifications exceeded the limitations of her science. She knew a lot about golf and had participated in the Masters and played at the U.S. Open in 1984. She even had a mentor, a professional golfer named Roxana Fiss, to whom she would return to MIT on more than one occasion to pick her brain.
Now, it’s almost 20 years later and Sethi is still offering the skills she learned at MIT to thousands of men and women using her company GolfGeek — the “Rain Man of golf,” or any sort of “experiential learning,” as Sethi prefers to call it.
And her advice is as fresh today as it was in 1993.