MSE Outstanding Senior Award: In recognition of the most outstanding graduating senior as defined by the statement, “the graduate who, in 5 years, we would be most proud to call our graduate.” The student is expected to have high character, outstanding achievement in academics and activities and the promise of continuing these exemplary qualities as an alumnus.
Andrew Whiteman, from Bettendorf, Iowa, is the Spring 2021 recipient of the Iowa State University Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) departmental Outstanding Senior Award.
Whiteman graduates this semester with a Bachelor of Science in Materials Engineering with a specialization in metals. He is being honored for outstanding academic achievement in the classroom as he is graduating with the distinction of summa cum laude. In addition to Whiteman’s scholastic achievement, his consummate work outside of the classroom speaks to his high character.
Whiteman has been involved in a vast array of activities while at Iowa State that have added a breadth to his education. His previous activities include serving as a College of Engineering tour guide for the Engineering and Ambassador Mentorship Program during his freshman and sophomore years; participating in Cast in Steel with the Steel Founders Society of America during his sophomore year, where he competed in a cross-functional team to design and manufacture a historically accurate Viking axe; and serving as an Engineering Career Fair Ambassador during his sophomore and junior years. Additionally, he has served as the communications director for the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi for the last two years. In addition to his club experiences, he has participated in almost every intramural sport available and has won the coveted intramural championship t-shirt three times in pickleball and once in basketball.
In addition to many activities outside the classroom, Whiteman has added a depth to his education through job experiences. Since his sophomore year, he has been working as a year-round intern at John Deere in Advanced Materials and Mechanics. In this position, he improved fatigue lifetimes in welds through collection and analysis of metallurgical and nondestructive-evaluation data; leveraged ASTM wear analysis standards to improve tribological properties in product performance; and optimized fatigue data collection by establishing a foundation of neural network from metallurgical testing. Whiteman worked an additional internship with John Deere during the summer of 2020 as a stamping and tooling manufacturing engineer intern, where he improved manufacturing efficiency by developing internal strategies to monitor incoming steel properties and supported improvements in quality through the creation of a stamping defect measurement system.
In June, Whiteman will be starting at Caterpillar in the Leadership and Technical Development Program, where he will do a series of three one-year rotations in various manufacturing settings.
“Andrew has exhibited outstanding character during his four years in the MSE family, and we know this will continue beyond graduation and into the next chapter of his life,” said MSE academic advisors Andrea Klocke and Holly Dunlay-Lott.