Hayden Hast

Major: Electrical Engineering Minor: None

Extracurricular Activities:
I believe that you must be successful in the classroom before taking on any extracurricular activities therefore schoolwork has always came first. However, I have been able to take part in a large number of activities outside of the classroom setting. I was fortunate enough to continue to play the game I love in college as I was a Running Back for the Valparaiso Football Team for all four years of my collegiate career. I believe that the lessons and virtues I learned through my football career are the reason for my success in other areas of my life. Aside from athletics, I am a member of the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, where I served as President my senior year. I also had the privilege as serving as Alumni Relations Officer and President in two separate years for the campus wide senior honor society, Mortar Board. I am also an active member of the underclassman honor society, Alpha Lambda Delta. In addition to the various honor societies, I have been a member of the Student Alumni Association for the past 4 years and have served as a committee chair and Vice President. Due to my academic success, I have been given multiple opportunities to assist my classmates with coursework through tutoring in the Hesse Center, Lab Aiding for multiple electrical engineering courses and being a grader for various courses. I am positive that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to take part in half of these activities and organizations if I would have attended a larger university. Just another reason I am so thankful for my experience at Valpo.

Honors and Awards:
Although honors and awards aren’t everything, it is always nice to be recognized for your hard work. While at Valpo I have earned a number of different awards in relation to academic performance, athletics, and extracurricular involvement. Academically I have been named to the Dean’s list for the past 5 semesters and was awarded the Tiede Scholarship in 2013. Through the combination of my academic and athletic performance I have received the Outstanding Student Athlete Award the previous two years, been named to the PFL Academic Honor Roll all 4 years of my collegiate career, and have been awarded a varsity football letter twice. Honors I have received due to a combination of my collegiate activities as a whole include the Sigma Phi Epsilon Balanced Man Scholarship, Tau Beta Pi Record Scholar, and the Eastmond Outstanding Senior Award.

Internship(s):
I have had the privilege of taking part in two summer internships while at Valpo. During the summer after my sophomore year, I worked as a Research Engineering Intern in the Automation and Enterprise Solutions division of Caterpillar Inc. In this role I not only got to work with some cutting edge automation technologies, but also got to understand how to work efficiently in a professional setting. The summer after my junior year, I made the drive down to Dallas, Texas to work with Texas Instruments in the MSP430 Customer Applications division as an Application Engineering Intern. While in Dallas, I was able to apply many of the skills I learned in my Valpo Microcontroller class and also continued to improve on my soft skills as I was put in charge of implementing a department wide documentation initiative requiring collaboration between many different groups and managers. Overall, I was extremely pleased with the opportunities I had for internships presented to me through various Valpo connections.

Research Interest:
During my stay at Valpo, I conducted research in the nanotechnology field of Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) with Professor Douglas Tougaw and Professor Sami Khorbotly. I found this extremely interesting because I got to work on something that no one else had discovered yet. My undergraduate research experience was one of the most rewarding of my collegiate career. The paper detailing the results of our research, “A Signal Distribution Network for Sequential Quantum-dot Cellular Automata Devices”, is currently in press in IEEE Transaction on Nanotechnology.

Favorite Quote:
“Work Hard In Silence, Let Success Be Your Noise” – Frank Ocean
Prospective plan for after graduation:
Upon graduation I will begin my career at Texas Instruments Inc. as an Applications Engineer. Although I enjoy engineering, I find my true passion to be helping others reach their full potential by being a great leader. Therefore, I plan on earning my MBA while working with Texas Instruments.

My favorite memory happens to be a very recent one. I helped organize the first ever College of Engineering Dodgeball Tournament as part of the annual TED Week festivities. It turned out to be a smashing success! In all we had more than 70 engineers and professors packed into the ARC for 2 hours of dodgeball mayhem. Each team had a professor and I think they got into it more than the students. The best part was the fact that we all got to have some fun together outside of the academic setting where our only worry was dodging the little red balls rather than a midterm or lab report.