Many school college students take part in sports activities, take heed to music, or play video video games of their spare time, however IEEE Student Member Gerard Piccini prefers novice radio, also called ham radio. He’s been concerned with the two-way radio communication, which makes use of designated frequencies, since his uncle launched him to it when he was a teenager. His name signal is KD2ZHK.
Piccini, from Monroe Township, N.J., is pursuing {an electrical} engineering diploma on the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania. The junior is president of the college’s W3USR novice radio membership. He’s additionally a member of Scranton’s IEEE pupil department, the IEEE Club.
Gerard Piccini
Member grade
Student member; member of IEEE-HKN’s Lambda Nu chapter
University:
University of Scranton in Pennsylvania
Major:
Electrical engineering
Minors:
Math and physics
Grade:
Junior
Another of his passions is robotics. He captained one of many college membership’s groups that participated within the Micro Mouse competitors held throughout the October IEEE Region 2 Student Activities Conference, hosted by Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. The Scranton staff competed in opposition to different pupil branches to construct and program small robots to navigate a maze within the shortest time potential. The staff positioned second.
“The contest was a great opportunity for me,” Piccini says, “to learn how to apply the skills I’ve been learning from classes into a project that I designed myself.”
Piccini joined Scranton’s novice radio membership when he was a freshman. Overseeing the membership is IEEE Member Nathaniel Frissell, who has taught Piccini physics and electrical engineering. Frissell seen Piccini’s curiosity in radio know-how and requested the scholar to help him with analysis. Piccini now’s serving to to develop a low-cost, low-power system to ship a sign into the ionosphere and measure the time it takes to return.
“The system will allow us to collect more data about the ionosphere, which is an ionized layer of the atmosphere and is important for radio propagation,” he says. “Right now there are not that many full-sized ionospheric sounding systems. If we can make them cheap enough, we could get ham radio operators to set them up and increase data points.”
“I like it when I have a project and have to try to find a solution on my own.”
Piccini is energetic with Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation, which incorporates novice radio lovers {and professional} scientists who collaborate on analysis.
“The idea behind HamSCI is getting citizens involved in science,” Piccini says.
His analysis, he says, has led him to contemplate a profession in RF engineering or digital sign processing, both in academia or trade.
A born problem-solver
Like different budding engineers, Piccini has loved taking issues aside and determining how one can put them again collectively once more since his youth. Neither of his dad and mom was an engineer, however they inspired his curiosity by shopping for him engineering kits.
A highschool physics class impressed him to review electrical engineering. It lined circuits and wave mechanics, a department of quantum physics during which the conduct of objects is described by way of their wavelike properties.
He initially was undecided about whether or not to pursue a level in physics or engineering. It wasn’t till he realized how one can code and work with {hardware} that he selected engineering. And though he nonetheless enjoys coding, he says he’s glad he in the end selected electrical engineering: “I like it when I have a project and have to try to find a solution on my own.” He is minoring in arithmetic and physics.
Student Member Gerard N. Piccini [second from left] with teammates from the IEEE Club Student Branch who competed within the IEEE Region 2 Micro Mouse contest. Gabrina Garangmau
An IEEE pupil chief
Piccini says he joined IEEE as a result of he felt “trapped in a bubble of academia.” As an underclassman, he recollects, he didn’t actually know what was happening within the discipline of engineering or in trade.
“Being involved with IEEE helps give you that exposure,” he says.
He is a member of the Lambda Nu chapter of IEEE’s honor society, IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu.
Scranton’s IEEE Club provides shows by engineering firms and technical talks. The membership additionally encourages college students to clarify the work they’ve accomplished throughout their internships.
To give members skilled boosts, the membership holds résumé-writing periods, conducts mock interviews, and has the scholars observe their public-speaking expertise.
The department additionally encourages its members to get entangled with neighborhood tasks.
Piccini is secretary of the scholar department. The place has given him management expertise, he says, together with instructing him how one can set up and run conferences and coordinate occasions—expertise he wouldn’t have picked up in his courses.
As captain of the Micro Mouse staff, he was liable for mentoring youthful college students, overseeing the design of the robotic, and setting the agenda so the staff would meet the competitors’s deadlines.
He notes that the IEEE Student Activities Conference is a good way to fulfill fellow college students from across the area.
Being energetic in IEEE, he says, is “a great opportunity to network, meet people, and learn new skills that you might not have—or already have but want to develop further.”