Former W.W. Allen Scholars – Where are they now?
Monday, January 10, 2022
Media Contact: Kristi Wheeler | Manager, CEAT Marketing and Communications | 405-744-5831 | kristi.wheeler@okstate.edu
Each year, the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology at Oklahoma State University awards W.W. Allen scholarships to top students who are destined to be tomorrow’s leaders in business and industry worldwide.
The W.W. Allen Scholars Program provides unequalled opportunities for students focused on education, training and leadership in preparation for professional careers in business and industry. The program is designed to stimulate intellectual growth, accelerate professional and leadership development, develop interpersonal skills, and develop global awareness and cultural perspectives.
This year, the staff of IMPACT caught up with a couple of former scholars to find out where they are and what they’re doing today.
Traveling the world
CEAT graduate Copeland helps with sustainability around the globe.
Nick Copeland was a W.W. Allen Scholar from 2009-2012. He graduated from OSU in 2012 and then graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2013.
As an undergraduate student at OSU, Copeland majored in civil engineering with an environmental option focusing on water. As part of the W.W. Allen Scholarship program, Copeland had the opportunity to earn his master’s degree at Cambridge, majoring in engineering for sustainable development.
Copeland is from Shawnee, Oklahoma. Growing up, he lived close to his grandparents in Altus, Oklahoma, where they own a farm.
“Just seeing their farm and always hearing about the different delivery on the Altus reservoir, I was always quite interested in water,” Copeland said.“Especially hearing about all of the water problems that Texas had with their severe droughts, and seeing that it’s going to be more and more of a problem all the time.”
Receiving the W.W. Allen Scholarship was a blessing for Copeland and for his parents. Copeland has a twin brother, and his parents are school teachers.
“It was amazing to have the extra scholarship as an undergrad,” Copeland said. “I had two unpaid internships during my undergraduate studies,and I never would have been able to participate in them without the scholarship.”
One of the internships was with an organization that provides engineering support in developing countries. They partnered with another organization and traveled to West Africa for engineering projects. The following summer, Copeland interned in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C.
“These internships were stepping stones to broaden my horizons to prepare me for my master’s degree at Cambridge in a way,” Copeland said. “The D.C. internship really opened my eyes to a lot of things and got me really curious about sustainability and looking at ways I can use my engineering. Along with water, air pollution was something I was quite interested in too. I’m sure there are different master’s programs out there that focus on what my program at Cambridge focused on, but I think it was quite unique in that it focused on policy, engineering and business. I didn’t realize that these all kind of go together. In some ways, people consider my master’s degree a little bit on the softer side, but in the end, it taught me to be able to think about the bigger picture of the problem rather than just focusing on only the problem. I think the whole Allen scholars program encourages this, to step back and look at the bigger picture and broaden our mindset.”
Copelands master’s program had a business component to it, as well, where he worked on a business project with a company called Arup, which is where Copeland is today.
“I really liked everything about the company. They’re not very big in the U.S., but they are one of the top engineering companies in the world,” Copeland said. “The headquarters is located in London and they are quite unique because they are employee owned. They reinvest a lot of the profit back into research funds.”
Copeland was working on a research funded project and at the time, he had a cousin, also an OSU alumnus, who lived in Bath, England.
“I thought, ‘Wow! This is a really great company who is working on award winning projects! Why not apply for a job?’ I could work here and be close to family,” Copeland said. “So I applied, got a job, and nine years later, I’m still working for them. The group I worked with was amazing. “I was working on flooding projects in Cardiff [Wales]. Instead of just focusing on the flooding, we stepped back, and looked at the bigger picture, the bigger problem. We’re not just going to build traditional big storage tanks and big pipes and push a couple downstream. We’re going to solve the problem at the source.”
They focused their attention on the green infrastructure — called Queen Mary’s Walk — and over the eight years Copeland was there, he was working on a hydraulic watering design that fixed the whole city’s sewer problems and flooding problems, which has been an award-winning project.
Copeland met his wife in Cardiff and now has a son who is almost 3. They live in Toronto.
“Toronto is really picking up on the green infrastructure,” Copeland said. “They are bidding on work and want me to help grow the team there. When I started in Cardiff, I think there were only about 30-40 employees, but now there are around 150. They want me to help grow the team in Toronto, which now has around 20-30 employees.”
Arup has locations all across the United States, including Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Boston, New York and in Oklahoma. In Tulsa, they are developing the Museum of Popular Culture. Along with building numerous bridges and a lot of buildings, they are also credited for designing the Sydney Opera House, using pre-stress concrete, which is one of the things they are known for.
Copeland credits the Allen Scholars Program with the leadership skills he developed while in the program. He is now able to step back and look at the bigger picture of working toward a more sustainable future.
“I was fortunate and got to meet Mr. Allen,” Copeland said. “I don’t think that the younger scholars get the same opportunity now. Karl Reid, who was the dean of CEAT, was leading the program at the time and it was just such a good experience to learn from them about the different professional skills and get that mentoring that you can’t really get anywhere else. The life stage I’m in at the moment, having a family and having kids, I just look back at the experience I had from the W.W. Allen Scholars program and realized it was more about the relationships I developed. That’s the biggest thing really. It set me up for so much.”
Making a difference
CEAT graduate Beem helps teach engineering in Africa.
Heather Beem was a W.W. Allen Scholar from 2003-2008 majoring in mechanical engineering.
Beem grew up in Oklahoma and was excited to come to OSU because of the CEAT Scholars Program.
“Graduating high school, I figured out that engineering was something I wanted to do, but when I saw that OSU had the CEAT Scholars Program, that was pretty unique,” Beem said. “I saw that it had an international component to it, which really got me interested and cemented my decision to go to OSU.”
Being a CEAT scholar and a W.W. Allen Scholar really opened her eyes to a world view. This meant she was able to travel to Washington, D.C., and to Japan to see a lot of really interesting engineering work being done in different contexts.
“Being an Allen Scholar meant I got to meet with Mr. Allen once a year, and he would tell us stories about his career,” Beem said. “Through that, I really got to see an example of somebody who had built a really interesting engineering career. He really highlighted how much the international component of his work impacted his life. That gave me a picture for the first time of a successful engineer, who had built this interesting career by explicitly seeking out international experiences. That planted a seed for me, that I could do something interesting as an engineer and inspired me to also seek out international opportunities.”
After graduating from OSU, Beem was fortunate to get into Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for graduate school and pursued a direct Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, bypassing her master’s.
Karl Reid, who was the dean of CEAT at the time, was instrumental in her decision to apply to MIT and supported her in the application process. Reid was also a graduate of MIT and enjoyed comparing stories with Beem about their experiences there.
About halfway through her degree, Beem felt compelled to find something as a side project that she could do in addition to her normal research that could have some sort of impact in the world.
Fortunately, at MIT, there are a lot of programs and initiatives going on, so she started looking around and found herself drawn to a program called D-lab, which is a really popular program at MIT that works with people around the world to develop and advance collaborative approaches and practical solutions to global poverty challenges.
Beem was instrumental in starting one of the classes in the D-lab, which included engineering students working on projects in the developing world.
“Prior to that, I didn’t really know that as an engineer, I could apply my technical skills to help people with real pressing problems they are facing in their daily life,” Beem said. “I sort of gravitated toward that program and tried to figure out what else I could do. Which aspect of what they are working on could I try and plug into? I realized that I was really interested in education.”
As a mechanical engineer, Beem did a lot of hands-on, project-based learning and felt the personal impact of that. As she was working on experiments and projects in the lab, she really connected with engineering at a much deeper level. She became more interested in it, and felt like she understood more of what was happening.
“I started to ask myself what it would look like to help students in other parts of the world to have that same experience of hands-on, project-based learning,” Beem said. “Was it possible for students who are living in the hardest parts of the world to actually access that? What would it look like for a student in a remote village in Africa to really have an experiential, hands-on learning experience as they grow up?”
Thanks to some connections through the D-lab program, Beem and some other MIT students were able to reach out to a few schools in Africa.
Beem called some schools in Africa and asked them if they were interested in having MIT students come over and try out some engineering projects with their students. The school that they were able to connect with and was most receptive to the idea was in Ghana.
“I went there for about two weeks that summer, in the middle of my Ph.D. program, and it was a totally new experience in every possible way,” Beem said. “Everything was different, the weather, the food, the way people interact with each other. It was completely different. It was a very impactful experience for me.”
While there, Beem was welcomed into the home of the vice principal of one of the high schools, who hosted Beem for the 10 days she was there. They were very welcoming and eagerly took her to their school room they called a lab.
“On the first day that I was there, I kind of waited patiently while some students eventually filed in,” Beem said. “I was really excited to meet them, and they were really excited to see what was going on. This was during their summer vacation so normally the students were not at school. They would have been helping their families sell a few things in town to make money for the day, but they were intrigued by something new, that something interesting might happen. As they slowly arrived into the room, I asked them if they were interested in doing some engineering projects. I asked them what kind of things they would like to work on, and they sort of flipped it back on me and said, ‘Anything you want. Whatever ideas you have, we want to try.’”
Beem asked them what types of materials they had to work with. Her plan was to use the materials on hand to see what projects she could come up with. The tone in the room went from excitement to disappointment and shame because they didn’t have any materials.
“I looked at them and told them that maybe there were objects in this room that we can start with and we will see where we go from there,” Beem said.“There was a young boy in the group who found a bucket. He brought me this bucket and asked me if we could use that. Everyone was laughing, but I said, ‘OK, let’s see what we can possibly do with this.’ There was no electricity in the school, so we decided to try to generate electricity and would use the bucket to make a wind turbine.”
Over the next few days, they were able to use the bucket as the base of the wind turbine. Beem guided the students who cut it in half. Using the two halves of that bucket, they put it together in a way that formed what they call a savonius wind turbine. Beem then had the students gather scrap wires and collect magnets from old computers. Slowly but surely, they built a wind turbine from scrap materials that were found in their environment.
“The experience was really powerful for me because I could see, as soon as the students started engaging in this, it was like the world was opening before their eyes,” Beem said. “I could tell that prior to this, they never felt like they themselves were able to do anything like this. They were creating something that could provide real value to them. It wasn’t generating a huge amount of electricity, but enough to charge a phone or something like that, and that was really exciting for them. I was at the school for only 10 days, but we made that wind turbine and did a couple of other projects. When I went back to the U.S., I kept thinking about them and realized that I was one of a very select few people in the world that had the opportunity to do hands-on engineering project work. For the vast majority of kids around the world, having a hands-on experience is something that they typically don’t have in their education.”
The sort of statistics that Beem had read about the developing world and poverty really became real for her based on that experience in Ghana. They no longer were statistics. They were real people that she had interacted with. This is when Beem became fixated on how to figure out what she could do to address this challenge.
When she returned to MIT, she realized she would be there another several years and started thinking about what she could do within her own environment to make an impact in education globally. This led her to partner with the D-Lab program to create a brand-new course on education so that in addition to teaching students about how they can support sanitation, health and energy efforts in other parts of the world, there would also be a class where students could learn how to interact with the community partners in education initiatives.
“I’m happy to say that this class is still ongoing to this day,” Beem said.“There have been around 100 students that have gone through the class and have all engaged with real communities in different parts of the world. This is what I did in my own environment, based on my very powerful experience I had in Ghana.”
During the remainder of her graduate studies, Beem kept in touch with the people in Ghana and at some point realized what she really hoped for and wanted to see was a large scale, hands-on education that would be available to students in schools, that they would have the opportunity to do experiments and activities and build projects.
“Everywhere around the world, kids are going to school, at least through elementary school in those countries, and even at that level they should start to experience and have access to hands-on education,” Beem said. “As that sort of crystalized for me that was a vision for what I hoped to see in the world. That drove me to dig deeper into these conversations with the people in Ghana, and I started asking myself what it would take to make something like this really happen. “I was having these conversations while I was doing my thesis work. Then the conversations led me and the other stakeholders to realize that if we could focus on teachers, that would make a big difference. If we are trying to see something change in the school systems, the teachers have to be involved. The teacher is the one who controls what goes on in the class.”
Beem decided to try a teacher training pilot to see what it would be like if they helped teachers find ways of repurposing materials in their own environments to do hands-on activities for their students.
After finishing her thesis in late 2014, Beem flew to Accra, the capital of Ghana, and did the first teacher training pilot for about two dozen science teachers and coordinators. The response she received was very positive. They loved having ideas for how they could use materials that they never really thought of as teaching tools because resources are limited. Training programs are also minimal for teachers.
Over the next year and a half, Beem continued to fly back and forth between Boston and Accra so she could train more teachers in Ghana. The teachers who attended the first training were starting to go out and train other people. No one was getting paid, they just did it because they realized that this was something that really needed to be done.
“Seeing that level of commitment from people on the ground made me realize that there is something real going on here,” Beem said. “It’s hard to make change in the developing world, but if this kind of thing is happening, then that seems to be a sign that this is hitting a real spot, and this is something that people are looking for. After a lot of prayer and soul searching, I decided to move full time to Ghana in 2016 and for the last five years, I have been living there and building a non- governmental organization, building a team that is working to scale hands-on teacher training as far as we can in Ghana and hopefully throughout the entire West African region in the years to come.”
Beem is the founder and CEO of Practical Education Network (PEN). She and her team have trained 3,500 teachers, most of them are all from different schools. PEN has seven master trainers and another 90 trainers. PEN has impacted over 600,000 students. The classrooms are packed. Each teacher is teaching 50 to 60 kids at once and some teach multiple classes of students.
Beem plans to implement this in other countries in the future.
“The goal is that something should be made available to as many students on the continent as possible,” Beem said.
Story by: Kristi Wheeler | IMPACT Magazine