by W. Thomas Miller, III

One of the more satisfying responsibilities of the department chairperson is to nominate students for various awards and scholarships administered at the college and university levels. Some of these awards are given primarily on the basis of academic achievement, while others consider additional factors such as leadership, extracurricular activities and financial need. You will find a list of all of the 1994/95 ECE department student award winners elsewhere in this edition of Signals and Noise. These students all deserve our congratulations for their success at UNH. In this article, I would like to give special notice to John C. Canfield, the recipient of the 1995 John W. McConnell Scholarship.

The John W. McConnell Scholarship is a highly competitive and prestigious award given by the University to a graduating senior each year. The selection is based on the combination of academic excellence and overall contribution to the university community. Our department has a reputation for having one of the more difficult academic programs on campus (I'm sure you remember!), and this generally works to the disadvantage of our students in competing for campus wide awards such as the McConnell Scholarship. ECE students tend to have good but not perfect GPAs and to have less time than other students for extracurricular activities. This spring, however, we had a clearly competitive candidate in John Canfield, and I had the pleasure of coordinating his successful nomination for that award by a group of five faculty members from across the campus.

John's overall academic record is easy to characterize: he received an A grade in every course he took at UNH, graduating this spring with a perfect 4.0 GPA. He is the only ECE student in recent years to graduate with a perfect academic record. John is a member of the Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society. In 1994 he was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship (also a prestigious award), from a national fund endowed by the United States Congress to foster excellence in science and mathematics. John clearly qualified for the academic excellence portion of the award criteria.

I first became associated with John outside of the classroom during the summer of 1994 when he was selected to participate in the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site project within the ECE Department (see the related article elsewhere in this edition of Signals and Noise). In that summer program, he worked under my guidance on a continuous speech recognition system using a prototype massively parallel processor computing system developed by a local company. During the following academic year, John continued to work on the same research topic on a part time basis for his honors program senior thesis. His performance as an undergraduate in the research laboratory is easy to characterize: he performed at the level of a quality graduate student in terms of both creativity and technical skill. He also was always cheerful and a pleasure to work with, and he was a major consulting resource used by other undergraduates, and often graduate students, working in our lab.

The remarkable thing about John Canfield was that the more people I talked to, the more things I discovered that he was simultaneously involved in. Consider the 1994/95 academic year. Throughout the year he worked in the ECE Department's Robotics Laboratory on the continuous speech recognition project mentioned above. He continued to help out with a UNIX database management project which he had worked on during the previous year within the UNH Complex Systems Research Center. He also assisted faculty in the UNH Zoology Department, designing and building electronic circuits for their research on the circadian rhythms of insects. He designed a prototype of a special satellite power supply for the NASA funded EOS/ECE small satellite project (CATSAT). He developed a demonstration/instructional program on digital signal filtering as part of the ECE course on real-time computer systems. He developed an instructional module on the use of the internet for knowledge acquisition and distant learning as part of a course on collaborative engineering. At the same time he assisted in religious instruction of teenagers at a local church, and on occasion assisted in his father's woodcarving business in Sandwich, New Hampshire.

It would have been easy to accuse John of lack of focus, and of spreading himself too thin, except that he did a great job at all of these activities while maintaining a perfect GPA with a full-time course load! I am sure that other highly qualified students were nominated from across the campus, but it came as no surprise to us when John Canfield was selected for the McConnell Scholarship. John continues to work in UNH research laboratories this summer, but to our regret will be leaving UNH for graduate school at Yale this fall.