The Reliability and Maintainability Center at UT garnered significant recognition recently when the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals awarded scholarships to a pair of UT students.
William Twickler, a senior in mechanical engineering, and Keith Crouch, a graduate student in reliability and maintainability engineering, received two of the three scholarships SMRP gives out annually.
UT students have won at least one of these highly sought-after scholarships for the past four years, securing the RMC’s spot as a leader in the field.
“The fact that an international group like the SMRP repeatedly recognizes our students is ongoing acknowledgement that we have something special here,” said Klaus Blache, RMC director and research professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
“Our engineering students and overall reliability and maintainability engineering program are being viewed with high regard.”
To be considered for the $2,000 award, students had to have a minimum 3.0 grade point average, demonstrated work experience in reliability or maintainability, and a demonstrated leadership ability, among other things.
For Twickler, who received the Higher Standards Scholarship, that experience came though an internship with Bayer, where he applied his RMC knowledge to help improve cost savings for the German chemical giant.
Crouch, who received the Dorothy and Jack Nicholas Scholarship, has used skills he learned through the RMC in internships as varied as power generation, natural gas transportation and manufacturing, helping find cost-effective methods in each.
Part of the College of Engineering, the center serves a key role in translating real-world scenarios and issues from corporations into a classroom environment, getting solutions to business, and providing vital hands-on experience to students before graduation.
Founded in 1996 with twelve corporate partners, it now has more than fifty, providing a wide array of opportunities for engineering students.
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C O N T A C T :
David Goddard (865-974-0683, david.goddard@utk.edu)