Graham Jacobs and Matt Nelms
What began as a class assignment has become an award-winning entry in a national paper competition for two mechanical engineering graduate students at the University of Mississippi.
Matt Nelms of Colorado Springs, Colo., and Graham Jacobs of Sacramento, Calif., won second place in the American National Standards Institute’s inaugural student paper competition. The duo’s entry was bested by a paper from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, but it edged out competitors from such prestigious engineering colleges as Cornell, Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Maryland and Purdue.
Other institutions with entries were Kutztown, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas A&M, UCLA and the University of Colorado. Nelms and Jacobs will split a $1,000 prize, which was presented Oct. 12 during World Standards Week 2012 in Washington, D.C.“I was confident we had produced a quality paper, but it was still shocking,” said Nelms of the win.
“Anytime you receive recognition for your work and ideas, it makes the time spent fulfilling. I was happy to receive a good grade, but national recognition was a ‘wow’ moment. Then reading the number of quality schools that entered created a small sense of pride. ANSI is a highly respected organization, so it told me that we had really done a great job.”
Graham said elation best describes his reaction to the win.
“I would have never guessed that a written assignment from a class could be recognized on a national level like ANSI,” Graham said.
ANSI and its Committee on Education led the effort to raise awareness about the strategic importance of standards and conformance among U.S. undergraduate and graduate students. In their second place-winning paper, “Facilitating Innovation through Standards,” Nelms and Jacobs discuss strategies to improve the speed and effectiveness of the standards-developing process and posit future approaches to standards development, using contemporary standards for fuel efficiency and composite materials, among other concepts, as a starting point.
“The definition of a standard is a document, developed and used by a consensus of the stakeholders, which describes how a product is used or obtained,” Jacobs said. “Our professor, Dr. Ellen Lackey, taught our course on standards. Without the course, we would not have the depth of knowledge necessary for the paper. She is also the one who suggested that we should submit our paper for the competition, so much of our success is due to her efforts.
“She is always there for support and teaching a class that is always useful and unforgettable.”
At the time, the duo had not really discussed submitting it to the competition, but after a reminder email, they decided to edit their class paper and submit it to the competition.
“Our paper discusses ideas to streamline and improve the effectiveness of the standards-development process,” Nelms said. “We also discuss how current models of standards development from industries, such as automotive and aerospace, could be expanded to make standards more universal, enhance collaboration and make the standards process more approachable.”
Staff and faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering join Jacobs and Nelms in their jubilation.
“I am indeed thrilled to see two of our best students shining well,” said Arunachalam Rajendran, chair and professor of mechanical engineering. “Matt and Graham are great students. They had taken graduate level courses under me and had performed extremely well.”
“Graham and Matt are great representatives of Ole Miss engineering,” said Lackey, professor of mechanical engineering. “They successfully demonstrated their ability to apply concepts from the classroom to real-world issues to a national panel of industry and government leaders who judged their paper. They presented well-reasoned conclusions concerning ways in which standards facilitate innovation.”
While winning is an honor, Nelms and Jacobs said drawing attention to the academic excellence and leadership found in the School of Engineering is also very satisfying.
“It was great to shed a little light on Ole Miss engineering, and I believe that this is as much a reflection of our own abilities as it is a testament to the quality of the mechanical engineering department,” Nelms said. “We have a great faculty that has really propelled us along our academic careers and pushed us to be more than number-crunching engineers. It was great to see Dr. Lackey, as well as Dr. Rajendran, smile when they heard the news.”
“The fulfillment came from seeing that the paper that Matt and I wrote competed with all the Ivy League engineering schools and won out, second only to the University of Alabama (at Birmingham),” Jacobs said. “It’s recognition of our school and the ability for our professors to teach students that are competitive with all other engineering students.”
A dual degree master’s candidate in mechanical engineering and in curriculum and instruction, Nelms is also a Center for Mathematics and Science Education-MACI (Mid-America Consultants International) fellow. His thesis work is in mechanical characterization and statistical analysis of composite materials.
Jacobs is a material sciences major slated to graduate in December. A former intern with Toyota, he enrolled in a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt class and takes his certification test in November. With his combined skills, Jacobs’ goal is a career in the aerospace industry.
Jacobs is the son of Paul and Kelly Jacobs of Hernando. Nelms is married to Jamie Nelms, a sociology graduate from Colorado.
For more about the Department of Mechanical Engineering, visit http://www.engineering.olemiss.edu/mechanical/ or call 662-915-7219. For more information about ANSI, go to http://www.ansi.org/
