On May 6, five outstanding Coral Gables High School students who plan on pursuing a degree in enginnering, were presented with a $1,000 scholarship. These students  engineered their way toward bright futures and have won the Brown and Caldwell Scholarship which recognizes their exemplary math and science achievements.

The Miami office of Brown and Caldwell, one of the largest and most renowned engineering firms with an integral focus on the U.S. environmental sector, awards $1,000 scholarships annually specifically to Coral Gables High School seniors. This year’s recipients are Cristian Alonso, Edward Fallon, Michael Hammond, Cole Scanlon & Derya Tansel.

While all the winners plan to study engineering, each one expects to focus on separate specialties within the field. Derya Tansel plans on going to medical school and pursuing a career in radiology after getting her engineering degree. Cristian Alonso wants to use his engineering degree to work toward his lifelong goal of working in aerospace design, eventually opening his own firm while Cole Scanlon is interested in systems and industrial engineering.

Engineering is an extremely versatile degree, and a worthwhile one at that. Forbes Magazine recently compiled a list of the 15 most valuable college majors based on a compensation database and job growth projections through the year 2020 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Five of the 15 most valuable degrees were types of engineering.

Students are drawn to engineering for a multitude of reasons. For scholarship recipient Edward Fallon, it’s all in the family-both his brother and father are engineers.

Scholarship winner Michael Hammond was attracted to the field for a very emotional reason.

“My cousin Elias lost his fight against leukemia in 2010,” Hammond said. “His passing reaffirmed my commitment to helping the world overcome adversity and motivated me to volunteer at the University of Miami’s Biomedical Research Center. Research is something that I have grown to love and something that I hope to continue to do throughout my studies in college. As a chemical engineer, I  hope to one day overcome adversity and find solutions to myriad diseasesand global issues.”

To apply for the admirable and door-opening scholarship, candidates had to submit an application and two teacher recommendation letters, along with a short essay to the prompt: ‘How can I improve the world as an engineer?’

The winning students answered this question with the same passion for math and science that consumes them all.

“The answer to that is yes, of course, without a single minute of hesitation. I mean, what other possible explanation could I offer for the nearly crippling process that is a curriculum heavily based in physics and advanced mathematics, if I were not to gain a sort of pleasure from it? One does not ask a masochist why he hurts himself, and the same logic applies here. It’s a vice, perhaps, an addiction to the discovery of the inner workings of the universe and [its] logic,” recipient Cristian Alonso stated when asked if his love for the subject was genuine.

We are all waiting in anticipation to see what these clever students have engineered for the future.

Congratulations to all 2014 Brown and Caldwell Scholarship recipients!