Members use new ASME/FIRST scholarship to nurture engineering

Henry Baumgartner
ASME NEWS

When Nerissa Lindenfelser enrolls in Penn State's mechanical engineering program next fall, she will do so with the assistance of the $5,000 ASME/FIRST scholarship. This is the first year this annual scholarship has been given.

The award goes to a high school senior active on a team involved in the well-known robot-building competition. Students must be nominated by an ASME member or student member active in FIRST, but only one nominee per team is allowed each nominator.

In quite a few cases, people joined ASME just so they could nominate a student for the scholarship. Jan Enderle, a senior project engineer with Xerox Corp. in Webster, N.Y., was one of them. Enderle, in fact, was the winning student's nominator.

"I'd been meaning to join for years, but I just never got around to it," Enderle said. Enderle has been involved with the FIRST team at Joseph C. Wilson Magnet High School, known as the X-Cats, for six of the 10 years the team has existed.

Jan Enderle, the nominator (left), Nerissa Lindenfelser, the winner, and John R. Parker, ASME president.

The Rochester, N.Y., school's mascot is a wildcat, and the team is sponsored by Xerox, hence X-Cats. Teams are typically a partnership between a corporation and a local high school. "We mentor the students through the engineering process," Enderle explained, "to inspire them to pursue science and technology." An effort is made to sign up the kids as freshmen, so by the time they've spent four years on the team, they have some idea of what they're doing.

According to Enderle, "Nerissa went way beyond the duties assigned to her. She took the initiative to help integrate the subsystems at the start of the project. She served as coach for the student drivers and she mentored younger students on the team. Nerissa actually went through the force and moment equations using free body diagrams to calculate the forces required for the hooking subsystem."

The award is not contingent on how the nominated student's team does in the competition, but the X-Cats were semifinalists in their regional competition — where they won the award for team spirit — and also at the finals in Orlando, Fla., last April. In fact, a brother and sister on the team were also finalists in the scholarship competition.

Nominees are chosen based on the technical ability, leadership and creativity that they show during their activity on the FIRST team. Academic performance is also taken into consideration, with financial need used as a tie-breaker. The winner was selected by a committee of ASME members and FIRST veterans Vince Wilczynski of the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., George Staab of Ohio State University in Columbus and Steven R. Chism of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Arlington, Va.

The winner receives $5,000 for the first year of study (nonrenewable) at an ABET-accredited (or equivalent) mechanical engineering or mechanical engineering technology program. Of the approximately $1.2 million in scholarships for students on FIRST teams announced in Orlando, ASME's was the only portable one — a student could use it at any school with an accredited program.

Significantly, of 19 nominees this year, five were women, as were seven of the members who made nominations. And of the 10 finalists, four were women. These numbers are significant in view of the efforts being made to overcome the historical under-representation of women in the engineering professions. Even more remarkably, five of those 19 nominators, including Enderle, joined ASME specifically to nominate someone for the award.

"My interest in FIRST is to inspire all the students," Enderle said. "Being female, I especially enjoy seeing the development of the young women and seeing their confidence develop and grow in the area of technology. It makes me especially proud to see a student like Nerissa take on a leadership role in all aspects of the design process." When Enderle was a student herself, she said, "I was interested in science and technology, but I didn't know what an engineer did. I wish I'd had FIRST then, for seeing what it means to be an engineer firsthand."

The scholarship will be given out to another high school senior next year. For information on how to nominate, look on the Web at www.asme.org/educate/k12/first/firstscholarship.htm or call Edie Ervin at ASME headquarters, (212) 591-7448.

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