Graduate Student of the Year
Mike Shinn Distinguished Member of the Year (Female)
Sophoria N. Westmoreland
Doctoral Student, University of Maryland, College Park
Sophoria Westmoreland knew with certainty what she wanted to do. She just didn’t know where and with whom. She had received bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and general engineering through a joint program at Georgia Institute of Technology and Clark Atlanta University, but building things was not her goal.
“I decided I wanted to teach,” Westmoreland says, “but didn’t know what level.”
She took a job teaching engineering design to seventh and eighth graders at Grantham Academy for Engineering, a middle school in Houston, Texas, and found a spark she was looking for.
“It’s at that moment when the students just ‘get’ the information,” she says. “That’s special.”
Finding ways to present engineering concepts to different age and ethnic groups has become the focus of research for Westmoreland, who is now in the combined Ph.D. and M.S. in mechanical engineering program at the University of Maryland, College Park. A student in the doctoral program, she is working in the Design and Reliability of Systems research group, studying student learning and development and determining how students in capstone design courses learn the mechanical engineering design process.
Westmoreland joined NSBE Jr. as an 11th grader and was a member of NSBE during her years at Clark Atlanta and Georgia Tech. She is a member and graduate student coordinator for the collegiate chapter at the University of Maryland now. She is also mentor to the group, which won NSBE’s 2009–10 Distinguished Chapter of the Year Award.
“They get to see me every day and see what a graduate student does and what grad school is all about,” Westmoreland says.
Roger Witherspoon is a journalist and author based in New York.