 MEET THE STUDENTS
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Nathan's Three Favorite Things about the ECE Department:
1) The people, both faculty and students
2) The multi-disciplined interaction I saw in IREAP & ECE
3) The funding
Advice to Incoming Students:
Do not view your time at Maryland as simply taking courses and doing what an advisor tells you to do. Immediately begin to surround yourself with people you aspire to be like one day. Graduate school is an exciting opportunity for a student to take control of his/her experience by exploring something no one has done before. Routinely play a game of "what if..." concerning your research. |
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Nathan
talks about ECE @ Maryland:
"My father is an electrical engineer and from a very early age introduced me to basic circuits and electronic components. I entered science fairs during middle school and eventually designed and built an RF repeater system along with many antennas and other devices. At age 18, I demonstrated a fabrication method at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that allowed a dramatic increase in current that could travel through a ceramic-based high temperature superconductor. I entered this work into the science fairs and won at regional, state, and national levels, earning third place in physics at the International Science and Engineering Fair.
Dr. William Kirwan, while president of the University of Maryland, presented me with a Francis Scott Key full scholarship for undergraduate study and successfully convinced me that Maryland was to be my academic home. After completing my B.S. in Electrical Engineering, I earned my master's degree and completed my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, with a major in electrophysics and a minor in microelectronics.
As an undergraduate, the scholarship and subsequent research opportunities attracted me to Maryland. As a graduate student, it was the multi-disciplined approach that ECE and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP) take to research. I crave interaction with people and saw this occurring in a research setting.
My research was focused on increasing the lifetime and performance of photocathodes, an enabling technology in the development of next generation light sources such as the free electron laser, for use in national defense, nanotechnology, and medicine.
The atmosphere within the department welcomes collaboration, challenges students to do their best work, and yet still values the process of learning for the sake of learning.
The students in ECE are an eclectic, exciting bunch. Students are vocal about their experience and take ownership of its outcome. I found that professors in ECE are genuinely concerned with the student experience and treat students as future professionals with promising futures.
In my long-term career, I plan to touch on the broad topic of energy production and storage. I feel that the challenge facing the current generation is massive and urgent: find a tractable way to meet the increasing demand for energy. As other nations aspire to have standards of living like those in the USA, the world's energy consumption will grow faster than the current technology and infrastructure can supply it. The ECE program helped me formulate this broad goal by instilling the importance of identifying with the purpose of our research."
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