HuffPo profiles homeless Thayer alumn

In a story ex­em­pli­fy­ing the cur­rent state of the econ­omy, The Huff­in­g­ton Post pro­filed Mau­rice John­son Th’76, an en­gi­neer with two mas­ter’s de­grees who is cur­rently liv­ing in a Boston home­less shel­ter. A youtube video of John­son cur­rently has over 227,000 views.

John­son — whose mas­ter’s de­grees are in plasma physics and acousti­cal en­gi­neer­ing from the Col­lege and Pur­due Uni­ver­sity, re­spec­tively — moved from Cleve­land to Boston in No­vem­ber 2010 for a job that was given to an­other ap­pli­cant. De­spite John­son’s im­pres­sive ed­u­ca­tion and over-qual­i­fi­ca­tion for ba­si­cally any job, he’s had trou­ble find­ing work, a dif­fi­culty he partly at­trib­utes to his age and race.

John­son’s over­all re­sume is not too shabby, ei­ther — he pre­vi­ously worked as a free­lance com­puter tech­ni­cian, an ap­plied physi­cist at Aero­dyne Re­search Cor­po­ra­tion and a se­nior re­search en­gi­neer at Lock­heed Mar­tin. Of the 30,000 en­gi­neers John­son said he worked with at Lock­heed from 1982-1990, a scar­ily few 3,000 re­main with jobs. The Huff­in­g­ton Post cites John­son as an ex­am­ple of a home­less per­son who de­fies stereo­types about those who have fallen on hard times.