Educated Insolence

This past Wednesday I found out that I shared the Herbert L. Toor award with my good friend David Durham. The Herbert L. Toor award is given to the EPP student with the best qualifier research paper that year. As such, David and I split the honor. This was quite a surprise to me. My research is great and has generated a lot of discussion within CMU and outside of it but my paper was not stellar. Readers of this blog can attest to my writing ability. While the heart might be there the mastery is not. As such I had mentally removed myself from the competition.

Thus it was a surreal feeling when the title of my paper was read before the assembled group. While I had mentally checked out I must admit I hadn’t emotionally. I did not have any reservations about not passing the research part of qualifiers. But CEIC, the electricity center for CMU, has had quite a record of Toor award winners, remarkable by itself, even more so considering the center is only 6 years old. Couple this with the fact that I was the only CEIC student my year taking qualifiers meant that present or not, I felt pressure to achieve the award.

Needless to say, with everything said and done, I felt more than relief when my name was called.  I am honored to have my name on a plaque within the halls of Carnegie Mellon but I hope this is a start of what’s to come, not the last.