David Emanuel
Kevin Scalera
(See story below)
The Ultimate Service
David Emanuel receives this year's Jere A. Chase Service Award
In his seven years at UNH, David Emanuel has accomplished much more than earning a dual degree in civil engineering and business administration. For starters, consider all the university organizations he's led at one time or another: the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Memorial Union Building Board of Governors, the UNH Marching Band, Kappa Kappa Psi (a music service organization), the Student Senate, and the Durham Fire Department Call Company. Just about the only thing he didn't preside over was the student body, but that's not for lack of trying. In his 1993 bid for that post, he lost a runoff election by 33 votes.
It's no wonder that Emanuel has received the Jere A. Chase Service Award honoring the graduating senior who has displayed outstanding student service to the university. But the partial list of his activities above can't begin to convey the passion he brings to his service to the community.
In person and even in the greeting on his telephone answering machine, Emanuel exudes the energy and intensity necessary to accomplish so much in a few years. His motivation to devote that energy to community service stems from childhood experience, he says.
He grew up in Stratham, a town whose spirit of volunteerism has given it a successful volunteer fire department and a thriving country fair run entirely by volunteers. As a 15-year-old Boy Scout in the Explorer program, Emanuel joined the Stratham fire department in 1986. He's been fighting fires ever since.
Emanuel is now a level III firefighter (the state's highest certification), an EMT, and a New Hampshire fire instructor. He has held a part-time job with the Durham Fire Department throughout his time at UNH, and has also continued to answer fire calls in Stratham whenever he's home on weekends and during the summer.
After graduation, he plans to join his father's engineering firm, Emanuel Engineering, in Stratham--and continue fighting fires in both Durham and Stratham. This is the service he is most proud of. "You're pretty much risking it all," he says. "It's the ultimate service."
Emanuel has run into former UNH President Jere Chase a number of times in the course of his campus activities. He first met the former UNH president when the Memorial Union Building addition and renovation was being designed. (Emanuel was on the student committee that participated in the process, and Chase had a particular interest in the building, since he headed the fundraising effort when the MUB was first built some 50 years ago.)
Emanuel, often an MC at UNH pep rallies, has also seen Chase there rooting for the Wildcats. As for the award, Emanuel says, "It's a big honor to be associated with Jere Chase because of all that he's given to the school."
Engineer Extraordinaire
Kevin Scalera receives the Hood Achievement Award
Kevin Scalera recently stretched a fork to four times its normal length while an audience of first and second graders looked on wide eyed. Then he showed them a lawn mower engine that had been sliced in half and color coded, part by part, inside.
To his admiring audience, Scalera must have seemed like a magician. But he's only a mechanical engineer--which just might be the next best thing. "I want them to get the idea that engineering is fun," says Scalera, winner of this year's Hood Achievement Prize.
Awarded to "the senior man who has shown the greatest potential through character, scholarship, leadership, and service to community," the Student Senate award is presented at each year's Commencement Ceremony.
Scalera's achievements go way beyond fork stretching--which, by the way, he does with a metal rolling machine. Most recently, he has been working on the mechanical design of detector housings for instruments on the CATSAT satellite. (See story, page 1.) "The challenge," says Scalera, "is to build it to survive a launch, which causes vibrations of up to 20 G's--20 times the force of gravity."
One professor describes Scalera as among UNH's top five mechanical engineering students in the last ten years. Another praises the energy, skill, and innovation that characterize his academics--as well as his other activities. As president of the Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society, he has led efforts to collect food items for a local food pantry and helped host a pumpkin carving festival at a foster care home. He compiled a web page for the local Tau Beta Pi chapter and spent many a lunch hour in Kingsbury's lobby selling pizza to raise money for the organization. He is also a tutor for freshmen and sophomore students.
"In my eleven years of serving as senior faculty advisor to the local Tau Beta Pi Chapter, I have never seen a more dedicated leader or caring undergraduate citizen," says Robin Collins, associate professor of civil engineering.
Scalera, who has met students from other schools at the national Tau Beta Pi conference, values the education and experience he's gained in UNH's mechanical engineering program. "I don't think you're going to find a better program," he says. "It provides a good building block for a job or for graduate school."
Next year, Scalera will begin graduate work in aerospace engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He will leave behind him tangible evidence of his time at UNH: an S-band antennae located on the roof of Morse Hall to download data from the CATSAT satellite. He will also leave behind countless people--from first graders to fellow students and professors--touched by the character and leadership that earned Scalera this year's Hood Achievement Prize.