TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Holden DeGrave, a recent graduate of The University of Alabama, received the 2018 Capstone Engineering Society Outstanding Senior Award.
A graduate of Southwest High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, DeGrave graduated from UA this spring with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
For eight semesters, DeGrave received a UA Presidential Scholarship and a UA Engineering Scholarship. He was also selected for two Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power and Energy Society Scholarships and a Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations Scholarship.
DeGrave maintained a perfect grade point average and earned membership in the Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Mortar Board honor societies. In 2017, he was named Alabama Society of Professional Engineers Student Engineer of the Year, Engineering Council of Birmingham Undergraduate Student of the Year in Electrical Engineering, and a Who’s Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities honoree.
He spent two semesters as a co-op student at Southern Company and was given the Southern Excellence Award in 2016, which recognizes outstanding work done by a Southern Company Employee. As a co-op student, DeGrave wrote four internal documents and gave seven internal presentations.
In the College of Engineering, he served as project lead of the Technology-Enables K9 Harness Project, UA IEEE student branch treasurer, a mentor in the Mentor UPP program, and as an electrical and computer engineering ambassador. DeGrave worked as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr. Andrew Lemmon and Dr. Aaron Brovant, both UA assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering.
“In class, his solutions are always creative, meticulously worked out, well documented, and clearly communicated, but I have been even more impressed with his talent for research,” Brovant said. “I have been able to give him open-ended modeling problems with only my notes and journal articles as reference, and he has supplied me with the solutions in short order as though they were no more difficult than homework.”
While at UA, DeGrave has served as Theta Tau community service chairman, a UA Safe Zone Ally, a UA Parent Ambassador, and a 2017 UA Dance Marathon miracle maker.
The Capstone Engineering Society, the alumni association for the College of Engineering, was established in 1973. CES is dedicated to maintaining relationships with UA engineering alumni to ensure the College is able to provide UA engineering and computer science students with a superior educational experience.
The CES began the Outstanding Senior Award in 1986 to honor an exceptional student who deserves distinction among his or her peers. An outstanding student is selected from the 11 academic programs in the College, and the overall winner is determined by a selection committee after assessing each student’s academic performance, professional and technical activities, College leadership, external leadership and other activities.