As a former recipient of multiple IEEE Power & Energy Society Scholarship Plus Initiative awards, I can speak first hand to the impact that these scholarships make for students. The scholarship not only relieved financial burden, but also created cascading impacts on my academic and professional career that truly made a difference in where I ended up today.
As an undergraduate student, this scholarship was one of the primary reasons that I decided to explore the power and energy field. It indirectly led to opportunities to do research during my undergraduate program at Texas A&M, and supported me in pursuing energy sector internship opportunities. With IEEE PES encouragement, I worked for ExxonMobil as a power engineering intern at a refinery and as an instrumentation and controls engineering intern at their ExxonMobil Research & Engineering center. This industry experience was significant in preparing me for real-world challenges and exposing me to wide-scale OT cybersecurity challenges.
I received continued support from the IEEE Foundation in graduate school as one of the first students selected to receive the IEEE Power & Energy Society Outstanding Student Scholarship. Continued engagement with IEEE and student branch leadership opportunities prepared me to be an active IEEE professional member and continue to grow my network.
Giving back to the IEEE Foundation is just one way that I plan to continue my involvement with IEEE and express my gratitude for the opportunities that were provided.
The IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Initiative provides scholarships and real world experience to undergraduates who are interested in power and energy engineering careers. The undergraduate engineering scholarships aim to accomplish this goal by attracting highly qualified engineering students to the field. These students, who are in the same position I was just a few years ago, are the very individuals who will one day develop new green technologies, build the smart grid and change the way we generate and utilize power. Join me in helping to fill the pipeline with power engineers for tomorrow's world!