Open House Remarks Spring 2014

David McLaughlin – Version 2.0 2/22/15

Good morning everyone.Thanks for braving yet another snowstorm to get here today.

Welcome and Congratulations on being admitted to UMass Amherst.

I’ll spend the next 5 minutes giving you some information that might help you decide whether or not to come here and join our class of 2019.

This is a big place with more than 25000 people. What’s it like?

First, everything’s here: we have microbiologists, engineers, business majors, entrepreneurs, gender studies experts, history, chemistry, Nurses, dance, French, computer science… you name it. We have prominent athletes, world class research centers, fraternities, sororities, hipsters, partiers, debaters, theater, protesters, liberals, and I think there are even a few conservatives. Everyone’s engaged, and it’s a 24/7 eye-opening experience. You come in, you set up in one of the dorms, and you get immersed in it all.

This is a research university. Faculty - like me –teach.And we advise students like you, and we create opportunities for you to work with us on our research.

Research means creating new knowledge, discovering things, coming up with better ways of doing and looking at things. Research isan important part of our mission. It’s important intrinsically, since it leads to new understanding. But perhaps moreso, research is important because it provides opportunities for students like you.

I do research in weather radar. I’ve raised nearly $50M in funding to create a system for advanced forecasting of tornadoes and other kinds of hazardous weather. This money goes to hire students as research assistants…this means grad students, and undergrad students like you, who do the work under my supervision.

In addition to doing research, I really enjoy teaching. I teach a class called Fundamentals to EE. In the fall of 2013 I made some big changes to the course – I changed it from a theory-only course to a course with a major lab component. In the lab, the students worked in teams to design and build their own self-driving robotic smart cars. Small model cars, not full size ones that we could get into.

After the class was over, and I wanted to know whether or not the lab wasactually helping the students learn.So I hired 4 students from the class as research assistants and asked them to look into it for me. These students were: Caitlin McLain, Max Perham, Deanna Robear, and Aaron Annan. During winter break, they dug in and came up with list of things we were doing well in the class and things that they thought we should change, and they ended up redesigning the basic concept of the robotic car.

Fundamentals of EE is a required course in nearly all ME programs across the country. Close to200 students take the course each year here at UMass, so you an imagine how many students take the course nationwide. When Caitlin, Max, DeAnna, and Aaaron analyzed my course and came up with some interesting findings about how to improve the lab design, I had the sense others would be interested in their findings.

So I encouraged them to publish. They wrote down their ideas and submitted them as a paper to the ASEE. The paper was accepted and they were invited to present their ideas at a regional conference last spring, and by the end of their junior year, these four were published authors. Let me tell you what happened next:

-UMass Boston is building a new engineering program, and the faculty there sought out this team for help designing a freshmen class, based on the ideas in their paper. These students built a set of their smart cars, and delivered them to Boston, and now those cars are part of the regular freshman engineering lab at UMass Boston.

-UMass Boston had a collaboration going with Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland. They are experts in computer gaming in Scotland. And the university there was interested in their little smart car design as the basis for a massive on-line computer game that would involve people everywhere on the planet driving these little cars and sharing information over the internet. Caitlin and Deanna spent their spring break in 2013 in Glasgow Scotland working with people there on this idea.

-Afterpublishing their paper, then working with UMass Boston, then Glasgow Caledonian, they developed the idea that UMass Amherst ought to make some changes – not only in the lab part of my course, but also in the way we organize the infrastructure for our teaching labs for all the courses in their major. They believed that the dept needed a maker space that would be managed and run entirely by students. The Dept. went along with their suggestion, gave them space, helped them raise money, and now there is a new student-run maker space here and a RSO that operates it and hundreds of students spend part of every single day in the space they created.

-What happened here: they took a class. Followed that with a research project. Published a paper. Presented their ideas. Collaborated with Boston. Went to Scotland and collaborated there on an really interesting high tech idea. Then they came back with this more global perspective and ideas about how to make this place better, and they worked with the necessary people to make that happen. They did all this all while they were juniors.

Now they’re seniors –working on specialized senior design projects and getting ready to graduate. Let me tell you what they’re up to:

Deanna tells me, “I’m working to design and build a machine upgrade that will allow for more efficient application of protective top coats for various fabrics used in cars such as convertible tops.” Last summer, DeAnna had an internship with PTC – a software company in Needham, MA. This year, she also works part time at PTC to pay for school, and she just accepted a full time position with them as a Product Manager and starts in June.

Caitlin graduates next fall. She changed her major a couple times, and because of that she’ll take an additional semester to graduate. Her senior honors project involves “doing research centered around a 7-degree of freedom robot. It has biomedical implications because it will allow for more complex understanding of kinematic motion so better prosthetics can be developed.” She just accepted a well paid internship position at Apple Computer, in Cupertino, CA, which is one of THE MOST sought after spots around.

Max is going to graduate school. He’s been talking about this for more than a year, and I’ve tried to recruit him into my radar lab. But his true love is aerospace. (Actually: Max’s real love is Caitlin, but that’s another story). Max wants to be a rocket scientist and he intends to go into space himself. He spent this year building a 10’ tall rocket as part of a nation-wide NASA competition. He tells me, “The project involves an 8 month commitment to design, build, launch, and fly a Mars Ascent Vehicle – MAV. The target altitude of the MAV on a high-powered rocked engine is 3,000’ above ground level, and launch date is April 14. “

Max has been accepted into Stanford University’s PhD program to study aerospace engineering. That’s one of the top 3 programs in the country and the world. So he’s well on his way.

<Caitlin, DeAnna, Max – stand up and wave to our guests…>

These are just 3 of our students – my students -- and I wish I had time to tell you about more students. I’m continually amazed at what they can do. I’m proud of them and they give me hope for the future.

I asked Caitlin and Deanna and Max to come here because their example illustrates how things like research and publishing andteaming and leadership are intertwined with teaching and learning.

I happen to be describing robotic smart carsand engineers, but this happens with biology and psychology; it happens with theater and linguistics; gender studies; it happens all across the campus as students are immersed in the research and educational experience here.

This is what we do here.

Our mission here at UMass Amherst –the reason we exist – is to serve the many talented, highly motivated students who can benefit from a world-class research university. Students like Caitlin and Deanna and Max. Students like Lea who you’ll hear from next. Students like you.

Welcome to UMass Amherst.