IEEE Grant Awards to EET/TET Students

TWO IEEE GRANT AWARDS TO EET/TET STUDENTS

IEEE recently established a new grant award program for undergraduate and graduate students.  Students are encouraged to generate proposals that outline projects they will undertake that use industry standards as part of their design methodology.  The IEEE selection committee then reviews the proposals and selects those worthy of a $500 cash award.  If selected for an award, the student team then generates a paper that describes their project and the standards they used.  The IEEE committee then reviews these papers and selects those that warrant publishing (http://www.ieee.org/web/education/standards/published_papers.html).  Two EET/TET student teams have had their abstract accepted, received the cash award, and their papers are currently under review for publication.  The first paper describes the work done in developing the Bottle-net Wanulator as a capstone design project using 802.X standards, while the second paper documents the development of a continuous process control project for use in the Power ET curriculum using the de facto Modbus standard and the EIA 485 industry standard.  In addition, two to three other teams of students are considering abstract submission in the near future.  This new IEEE awards program truly motivates students to practice and refine their written communications capabilities – a skill that continues to increase in importance as employers select graduates for entry-level positions.  Competing with students in other engineering programs as well as graduate students for the grant awards gives our graduates the ability to make head-to-head comparisons of their learning experiences with other academic programs.