The Material Advantage group received one of three World Materials Day awards given to student materials groups in October. 

“It was an outreach award,” said Kate Lindley, junior in materials engineering and president of Material Advantage. “We do different outreach activities all throughout the year.”

The Material Advantage group is a national chapter of the professionals’ society within materials engineering and the science community as a whole.

“Material Advantage represents the student chapters,” Lindley said. “There are many universities throughout the nation that have chapters from Material Advantage and we’re one of them.”

A report is given to the committee in the national organization and from that the committee makes its decision on which chapter should receive the award.

In the report, the group summarized all of the outreach activities it did in the past year and explained why it was important. Thirty different outreach activities were conducted, Lindley said.

Many of those outreach activities consisted of recruitment efforts as well as actually going into the community and teaching kids in K-12 schools about the importance of material science and chemistry.

“We wanted to get kids interested in engineering,” Lindley said.

The report was written by Tim Cullinan, graduate student in materials science and engineering, and was submitted to the committee at the end of spring semester.

“The outreach events from the past year ranged from demonstrations for recruitment to active school programs,” Cullinan said. “Almost weekly we were doing an event.”

The report was a showcase of what Material Advantage had done to promote engineering and science.

“We had science night at elementary schools,” Cullinan said. “We had volunteers who came from science programs.”

Each university in the nation that participates in Material Advantage has a chapter. This is the seventh year in a row for Material Advantage at Iowa State being the student chapter of excellence.

“We have a very successful student chapter as far as I’m concerned,” Lindley said.

There are around 50 members in the Material Advantage group.

It’s large for a Material Advantage chapter compared to other universities’ chapters throughout the nation. With this number of students, they are able to have the people to do these outreach activities, Lindley said.

“The students make it possible,” said Scott Chumbley, faculty adviser of Material Advantage. “The students do a lot to give us national recognition, just as much as the professors.”

The organization goes over what was done the past year and comes up with ideas to improve and do more during the present year.

“We try to do everything that is always done and we always try and progress to something new, something more, something better,” Lindley said. “We take it to our outreach, social activities, fundraising, everything.”

The award represents the efforts of Material Advantage trying to show the importance of engineering to youth and represents the mentality of Material Advantage at Iowa State.

“This award was just one set of activities that we do, but it’s very important and it’s probably one of the most important things we do, which is outreach, because we want more engineers,” Lindley said. “It comes down to our mentality and our ability to work together. We have fun doing it.”

The award was presented in a ceremony on Oct. 19 in Houston.