Daniel Hernandez – Oregon State University Chemical Engineering Student
Daniel Hernandez thought he would be the first member of his family to graduate from college. But his twin brother, Marcos, claimed that honor, graduating from Oregon State with a degree in chemistry last winter. Daniel, in addition to the rigors of earning a chemical engineering degree, undertook an amazing six-month internship at E. & J. Gallo Winery last year.
Many students experience some rough adjustments during their freshman year, but for Alison Bowden it was more than a typical transition from home to college life.
“I live with a mental illness, and the last year and a half was really hard for me,” said Bowden, an undergraduate in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University.
John Wager worked part time at a gas station in the early 1970s filling tanks and washing windshields, while attending high school in Southern California. One day, while fueling up, an older man asked Wager what he planned to do with his life. When Wager said he was considering a career in engineering, the man replied, “Well, you’ll most likely spend all that money going to school and then be unemployed the rest of your life.”
As the United States embarks on a new era of investing in clean nuclear energy, José Reyes is a driving force behind a technology designed to make it better. He’s devoted 40 years to making nuclear power plants both safer and more efficient.
“He might have survived, or he might have succumbed to exhaustion, dehydration, or hypothermia,” said Todd Shechter (’99 B.S., Management Information Systems), a member of the all-volunteer Corvallis Mountain Rescue Unit (CMRU).
Not every CMRU mission has a happy ending, and at the start of each one — a dozen or more a year — that nagging question hangs in the air: Is this going to be a rescue or a body recovery?
Thirty-five years ago, Fred J. Burgess (’50 B.S., Civil Engineering), the fifth dean of the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, told a reporter that he envisaged a telecommunications network that could break through the physical barriers of the university.
“Our [professors] could lecture to classes on other campuses as well as ours,” Burgess said, seven years before most people had heard of the World Wide Web and decades before electronic distance learning became ubiquitous.
In the 1980s, only about 1 in 16 American engineers was a woman. That proportion is a lot higher in the Wong family. Of six sisters, five became engineers, and all five graduated with engineering degrees from Oregon State University.
The five sisters are Pam Wong (’79 B.S.,Industrial Engineering), May Wong Knotts (’80 B.S., Mechanical Engineering), Sun Noble (’84 B.S., Civil Engineering), Michelle Wei Wong Lostra (’85 B.S., Civil Engineering), and Lai Wong-Smith (’86 B.S., Computer Science).
The middle son of a Turkish shopkeeper travels to America to learn English and earn a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Ten years later, he returns home and transforms the tiny family business into one of Turkey’s most successful global enterprises, with offices in 50 countries and employing more than 12,000 people.
