IEEE Student Member Bryan McLaughlin has done more in five years of college than most people do in an entire career.

McLaughlin, a senior electrical engineering student in a five-year program at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater, USA, was named to the All-USA College Academic Team in 2003 . He was chosen by USA Today, a selection of 20 top students from across the country. Other honors he's recently received are the British Marshall scholarship to study at King's College at the University of Cambridge in England later this year and a graduate student fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

As an undergraduate, McLaughlin completed internships at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., and at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. He also served as vice president of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, developed an engineering program for children in local elementary schools, and doubled the membership at the OSU IEEE Student Branch. Most recently, the 23-year-old McLaughlin was recognized for his work with Engineering Kids, a program he launched that introduces nine- and 10-year-old children to math, science, and engineering through hands-on projects such as building small battery-powered motors or tearing apart computers to see how they work. The inspiration for this project came from a Region 5 meeting that discussed the decline during the last decade in the number of students who enroll in engineering programs and graduate. "A few IEEE Student Branch Members and I used some extra money in our budget to find fun projects and go to a local classroom to do a demonstration as a mad scientist" McLaughlin says.

In the last two years, he and about 100 volunteers have worked with more than 600 students. "Often the better students are more inquisitive about how a device works, which shows that our message is getting across to kids," McLaughlin says. Engineering Kids would not have been possible, he says, without the OSU IEEE Student Branch, which he chaired for two years. Membership doubled during McLaughlin's tenure, thanks to some "aggressive advertising and recruitment measures," as he calls it. Members visited OSU's engineering classes and freshman orientation sessions to spread the word about new activities such as a Senior Design Day when electrical engineering students display their projects. Many engineering students were unaware that IEEE Student Branch meetings offered more than guest speakers and pizza, McLaughlin says.

McLaughlin grew up solving problems and working on designing projects that led him to engineering. For one, when he was a teenager, he built an underground sprinkler system for his family's yard because he didn't want to water the lawn every day. He also became acquainted with electronics when he helped his grandfather install thousands of lights for the community Christmas pageant every year, starting when McLaughlin was eight years old. McLaughlin's Marshall Scholarship to Kings College will allow him to earn a master's degree in his chosen specialty: photonics. "I find optics and phototonics exciting because some of the basic research that has come out of this field has not been applied yet," he says. "There's a huge world of innovations to be produced."

McLaughlin plans to use the NSF Fellowship to earn a doctorate degree after he returns from Cambridge. He is the first to admit that his accomplishments might seem overwhelming, but he has a strategy that works for him. "My r?sum? has a whole lot of activities, but not all were going on at the same time," he says. "This means I can spend more time on IEEE activities or starting Engineering Kids, because I don't have 15 activities going on at once, only one or two."

By Erica Vonderheid, The Institute, May 2003