Terman Awards celebrate top seniors, their schoolteachers and their enduring relationship
All great engineering students were once high school students, whose talents and inspiration were nurtured by teachers whom they’ll never forget.
That’s why the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Awards not only recognize the students who reach the top five percent of the graduating senior class, but also honor the teacher or mentor whom each student says inspired them the most. When the students and teachers were reunited at an awards banquet April 25, it was no surprise that what each had to say was heartwarming.
What was surprising, however, was the role reversal that so often took place. One after another during the luncheon, seasoned educators admitted to how deeply they’ve been touched by the young men and women they knew as teenagers. The very best students, it seems, can be as influential in the lives of their mentors, as their mentors have been in theirs.
Margaret Butler, a math teacher from nearby San Carlos, Calif., recalled that electrical engineering student Tracy Yi-Juin Chou came to school with such an extracurricular eagerness to master mathematics that the student tapped into her own deepest affection for the field.
“She would sometimes bring me problems, and we would brainstorm how to solve them,” Butler said. “This was so much fun for me. I have taught academic math for 22 years. I had worked in the computer industry for 15 years before that. Problem solving with Tracy excited all the math neurons in my brain and brought back all the joy of doing math. Tracy inspired me to be the best teacher I could be.”
Electronics teacher Ruben Bernadoni flew all the way from Buenos Aires and marshaled his best English to say this about his former student, electrical engineering senior Walter Vulej: “After 30 years as a teacher in high schools and universities, I must say Walter has been one of my best students, if not the very best one….I thank you because students such as you justify and give sense to our goal as teachers.”
By the time the students are headed for Stanford’s Commencement, their faculty advisors typically are no less impressed. Computer science assistant professor Vladlen Koltun said student Sergey Levine of Bellevue, Wash., turned the tables on his professors to the point where they found themselves vying for his approval.
“When it was time for Sergey to start doing research, there was actually an atmosphere of tension and competition in the computer graphics lab where we have five or six faculty members because everyone wanted to work with Sergey. Everybody was wondering, ‘Whom will Sergey choose?’,” said Koltun. “I’m very proud that Sergey chose to work with me.”
A moment of recognition
In all, two dozen students shared their Terman Awards with teachers from nine states and five countries. The School of Engineering pays for the transportation and lodging of all teachers from outside Northern California using an account established decades ago by Fred Terman, a visionary dean who donated honoraria he received to the school.
Current dean Jim Plummer set the tone for the day, emphasizing that the teachers were at least as much the guests of honor as the students.
“Of all the events that we do each year, this really is the most special,” Plummer said. “It’s a chance for all of us to talk about a group of people who do not get the recognition they truly deserve.”
Each student, in his or her own way, took full advantage of the opportunity to give the teachers the kind of recognition the dean meant.
Elizabeth Lowell, a civil and environmental engineering major from Ross, Calif., credited the dedication of her physics teacher Tucker Hiatt for helping her discover her abilities as an engineer.
“He spent multiple free periods of his time with me answering floods and floods of questions and really encouraging me to get a deeper sense of how things worked,” Lowell said. “I learned that as long as I was unafraid to ask questions, then I could do what I wanted. He made it really fun and inspiring to learn about science.”
Many students shared their awards not with their science or math teachers, but instead with teachers in the humanities. Student Ben-Gilmore Merrick, an Engineering-Product Design major from Santa Fe, N.M., explained why he nominated his English teacher, Robert Wilder.
“The two (product design and English) really aren’t that much in opposition. What unites them is creativity,” he said. “In Rob’s class I was really able to explore that creativity more than in any other class.”
Wilder then launched into a show-stopping monologue in which he facetiously argued that they were indeed in opposition (at least stereotypically), and grieved at the loss of a great writer to the clearly lesser pursuit of engineering.
“I dressed like it was a funeral even if I was warned that engineers consider themselves well dressed if their socks match,” Wilder said. “Now that you’ve given him this award, I feel I’m losing him forever to a group of people who read mechanical engineering magazines while on vacation. Ladies and Gentlemen, I know the P word makes techies like you want to disembowel yourselves with a slide rule but Ben actually wrote some damn fine poetry.
“I’m so full of despair I might have to take a pharmaceutical that some you probably helped ferry from benchside to bedside,” he continued. “So you must understand that while I feel honored to be chosen by Ben to give this eulogy for his soul, and I’m thankful to Stanford for this trip out here, overall I mourn the loss of a great fiction writer and someone who once had the potential to do something really important with his life.”
Comic relief (we can only hope) aside, what seemed universal among the students, teachers and professors that day was a strong sense of truly mutual admiration.
