Eta Kappa Nu at Oregon State University is an honor society for electrical and computer engineering majors through IEEE. At the end of each school year, the club recognizes two students with awards. This year winners were Yeojin Kim for the Robert Short TA of the Year award, and Noah Koontz for the Sophomore of the Year award.

Robert Short TA of the Year: Yeojin Kim

Yeojin Kim was born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea. She went to college at Sogang University where she completed a double undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering, and mathematics. She also worked as an intern for Naver, a South Korean web search engine, and as a software engineer for Qualcomm in Korea. She has served as a mentor for the Institute of International Education’s program Women Enhancing Technology to help female undergraduates studying in STEM fields.

“It is a great honor to receive this award. Sharing things I’ve learned with others during TA activities was one of the most pleasing moments,” Kim said.

Sophomore of the Year: Noah Koontz

Noah Koontz has been fascinated with the fusion of hardware and software from an early age. In middle school he got his first Arduino and attempted to build an open-source laser tag system with it.

“I’ve been a maker ever since,” he said.

At Oregon State, he has been working at the Open Sensing Lab, which has allowed him to apply his passion and skills to solve real-world problems in agriculture — building internet-connected devices for farmers and researchers to monitor their crops.

“I will continue to seize opportunities to work with embedded systems and solve real-world problems, hopefully having fun along the way,” Koontz said.