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Standout students
Friday, Jan. 1, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Jennifer Lyons and Greg Lynn, both Great Mills High School juniors, show their award from placing second at the Future Leaders project competition in Orlando, Fla. The two students spent six days in Orlando last month, presenting a UAS project and networking with industry representatives.
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Two Great Mills High School students spent much of the first week of December in Orlando, Fla. But this trip wasn't about Disney World.
This trip was about unmanned aerial systems and promoting the dreams of future engineers.
Jennifer Lyons, 16, of Lexington Park and Greg Lynn, 17, of California, both juniors at Great Mills, were among just 10 high school students selected to present projects at the Future Leaders Pavilion at the 2009 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference.
"The project we did was for an engineering club after school … totally extracurricular," Lynn said, sitting next to Lyons in the Great Mills High School computer lab last month.
"Our project was to build an unmanned aerial vehicle," Lynn said. "Basically, it's a plane that flies itself."
The club, which meets once or twice a week after school, worked from October 2008 to June 2009 to build an unmanned aerial system. While Allen Skinner, a physics teacher at Great Mills, is the club's sponsor, the students in the club were largely on their own to complete the ambitious project, they said.
"He's pretty much ‘Here's a room. Here's some of the stuff you need. I'll hold the fire extinguisher.' He's very hands-off," Lyons said of Skinner.
The idea was to create the vehicle and accompanying components and compete with college students at Webster Field in St. Inigoes in the annual Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International competition. It was quite a commitment for the high school students. "We didn't know what we were getting into," Lyons said. "There's always the constant threat of failure."
"… and embarrassment," Lyons added. "Going against colleges?"
But the unmanned aircraft created by the Great Mills High school team "worked OK at the competition," Lynn said.
So, when Skinner was contacted by General Dynamics about students presenting the project at this year's I/ITSEC, the work had pretty much all been done. As lead participants in the project, Lynn and Lyons were selected to make the presentation.
Skinner explained that Cyndi Turner, an employee of General Dynamics, is involved in the planning of the conference every year and saw the opportunity to involve the Great Mills club.
"Greg and Jenn are very good students," Skinner said in an e-mail. "Greg … is a natural-born leader with an incredible vocabulary and a knack for public speaking. He is gifted in the math and sciences."
Skinner praised Lyons for her work ethic and reliability. "She works very hard for her success," he said. "She is dependable and reliable and she is the second-in-command on the UAS team."
The project impressed conference organizers enough that they awarded the Great Mills team second place in the competition. Their "participation and placement in the event is a pretty big deal," Skinner said. "When you compete in anything on a national/international level and you place, then it is noteworthy."
The first-place project was presented by a student from India, Tanmay Chobha, who had created a simulation that could be used to train workers on how to respond to an accident and quickly reroute other trains.
Other projects that impressed Lyons and Lynn included a student who tried to create a terrestrial ionic propulsion engine and a team from Florida that created a depth-finder for bodies of water using Google map and GPS.
The students' six-day trip to Florida, which was entirely paid for by General Dynamics, included a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, where the students got a close-up look at the space shuttle Discovery. However, the bulk of their time was spent at the Orange County Convention Center, where they gave their presentations and networked with representatives from numerous companies. Internships were offered, business cards were exchanged and some of the professionals took time to offer some wisdom to the select group of students.
"We got hours of advice," Lynn said.
The most useful advice, according to both Lynn and Lyons, concerned making professional connections even while in college. "‘Connect with a company in the industry early and let them know what you want to do. Get an internship,' he said," Lynn said of one businessman's advice. The hope is that that company would help pay for their education.
How many business cards did they collect? "A lot," Lynn said. "My wallet's packed full of them."
Lynn's and Lyons' participation in the conference, as well as the engineering club's participation at the Webster Field competition, has boosted interest from other students at Great Mills, they said.
Jennifer Lyons is the daughter of Michael and Aree Lyons of Lexington Park. She hopes to study mechanical or electrical engineering in college, perhaps at Purdue University, and then work at a military base in the United States.
Greg Lynn said he hopes to study medical engineering or bioengineering at Johns Hopkins. He is the son of Scot and Jennifer Lynn of California.
