Elliot Bloom with daughter Maya Bloom.
Eliot Bloom, CSW ’87, sits in the Beatty Hall cafeteria beside his daughter, Maya Bloom, BCOS ’17, and remembers an old photo he took. Two-year-old Maya is sitting on the floor of a kitchen. In her hands is a copy of the Wentworth alumni magazine.
“I think it was probably fate that she decided to come here!” Eliot says.
The Blooms have much in common. Both took a keen interest in computers, inventing, and joining clubs. When Maya receives her Wentworth diploma this summer, it will be exactly 30 years after Eliot received his.
At Wentworth, Eliot kept busy, joining multiple campus groups—including the surfing club—and befriending many professors. Maya has spent her years juggling her own show on WIRE, playing softball, fundraising for Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (WILD), working as conference chair of the Society of Women Engineers, and working for Phi Sigma Pi.
Both Blooms are respectable inventors. Eliot holds 22 patents with 48 pending. Among them is a device to help retrain muscles and tissue in the heart. Maya holds a patent on a medical apparatus that assists pneumonia patients, and has two pending patents.
“My dad would always bring home stuff and let me play with it, like Solidworks,” says Maya. “He was always doodling numbers and calculations on scraps of paper. I had to hide my homework sometimes so that he wouldn’t draw on it.”
Maya is proud of her father’s work in the aeronautics, telecommunications, and biomedical industries. Eliot is similarly proud of his daughter’s accomplishments at Wentworth, and looks forward to following her career (which—for now—will be focused on cybersecurity).
“I’ve always loved this school,” says Eliot. “And I’ve seen through Maya that its strong core values have stayed the same.”
— Greg Abazorius
