Students shared their good news

Mohammed Mustafa Hussain

Ian Jackson

Computer engineering student Ian Jackson accepted a summer internship as a System on Chip Physical Design intern at Apple in California. Only one position is offered by Apple in hardware engineering each year and out of a diverse range of applicants, Jackson was chosen. He believes that the professors and staff at Statler College have pushed him to be self-sufficient and allowed him to be the best version of himself, which has helped him to succeed in this internship. Jackson stated, “I would like to thank Dr. Hefeida for helping me prepare for the multiple technical interviews. It meant the world to have someone openly help me get hired at my dream company.”

Evan McConville

This summer, computer science student Evan McConville began an internship at Parraid LLC. He was most excited to join the workforce and put the skills he learned in the classroom to practical use. Through his classes at Statler College, McConville was able to gain the valuable experience he needed to translate hex values and understand endianness and networking packets. He would like to thank Professor El-Wakeel and Professor Hefeida for all their help.

Sarah Nelson

Civil engineering undergraduate student Sarah Nelson was selected to participate in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program (SURE) with West Virginia Water Research Institute (WVWRI) and present her findings at the Undergraduate Summer Symposium. Her RAP mentor here at Statler College, Dr. Hopkinson, connected her with WVWRI and helped her pursue this excellent opportunity. Of the program, Nelson explained, “this is a great opportunity to learn more about the importance of water quality, how watersheds can be remediated, and how it connects with civil/environmental engineering.”

Sterly Pauliscat

Industrial engineering student Sterly Pauliscat accepted a summer internship with the Clorox Company as a plant intern at the Clorox Plant in Martinsburg, WV. As an international transfer student, Pauliscat believed getting an internship would be challenging, but through hard work and dedication, he was able to make it happen. He stated, “with the quality of education received here at the Statler College, I felt ready to get to know how engineers work in real life.”

Kathy Pinnock

Kathy Pinnock, a Biomedical Engineering doctoral student, has received the 2023 Diversity Travel Award to attend the American Society of Biomechanics Conference on August 8th-11th and the FNB Travel Award for the Bicycle & Motorcycle Dynamics 2023 conference on October 17th-20th in the Netherlands. Pinnock is thrilled to have the opportunity to share her research at both events on the upper extremity biomechanics related to manual wheelchair use and quantifying wheelchair dynamics using inertial measurement units to quantify movements in the real world. However, she is most excited about these conferences because, as a proud Latina engineer and neurodiverse individual, she will get to represent two diverse identities that lack representation in this area. On this topic Pinnock stated, “I have dyslexia, considered a neurodiverse condition, so getting where I am today was not always easy. For this reason, I believe future generations of students must have someone they can relate to and connect with.” While she feels that the classes and symposiums for graduate students at Statler College have been a great help, it is Statler’s accepting environment, an environment that allowed her to be herself and feel included, that Pinnock feels truly prepared her for this opportunity.

Rhia Bipin Roy

Rhia Bipin Roy, an undergraduate computer engineering student, received a summer internship at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in New York City. During this internship, Roy gained valuable experience in building, deploying and troubleshooting cloud infrastructures for top financial services clients through the AWS services ecosystem. What Roy found most exciting about this opportunity was that she was able choose the project she wanted to work on. She chose to do a project about designing and implementing serverless architectures, a more recent computing paradigm. Through this project, she has gained valuable professional client engagement skills. The core CPE, EE and CS courses she took at Statler College laid the foundation she needed in order to find success in this internship. In fact, this foundation helped her finish her first AWS certification in the first week of the internship. Roy stated, “I am grateful and indebted to my Statler college faculty, advisors and peers for the continuous learning and support that has helped me navigate through my internship thus far.”

Mohammed Tamim Zaki

Civil and environmental engineering doctoral student, Mohammed Tamim Zaki was selected for the for the 2023 class of West Virginia Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellows. Over the course of this excellent opportunity, he will receive valuable experience in the public policymaking process and gain non-partisan, data-driven insight into the science and technology policy issues faced in West Virginia. While engineers are developing new technologies that can benefit communities both environmentally and economically, policymakers may not always have a complete understanding of them, resulting in challenges when it comes to implementation. What Zaki finds most exciting about this fellowship is that it will provide him with the training and knowledge he needs to bridge this gap and better integrate engineering technologies and policymaking for rural communities within West Virginia. Zaki is currently conducting research at the Statler College involving data science applications for assessing the environmental and economic impacts of resource recovery and carbon capture technologies to manage organic waste in rural West Virginia and his experience has helped prepare him for this fellowship. Zaki stated, “My PhD advisor Dr. Kevin Orner has always encouraged me to engage myself in utilizing my research background in data science to solve real world problems.” He also believes the environmental engineering courses he has taken over the course of his graduate studies at Statler College have helped him better understand “that engineers need to involve themselves more in policy making so that the technologies that they develop are fully implemented for real world applications.” Zaki would like to share that Statler College biomedical student Taylor Stump has also been selected for this fellowship. He also wants other students to know that as a rural state, West Virginia is “in a unique position to be a national leader in rural decarbonization.” He strongly suggests that more Statler students to get involved in this unique opportunity and “develop themselves as science and technology policymakers to address today's grand challenges.”