UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Emily Leight, an industrial engineering student, has been selected to receive the Southworth International Group Inc. Honor Scholarship in the amount of $2,500 from the Material Handling Education Foundation Inc.
“Receiving this scholarship at the close of my junior year at Penn State is very exciting news to top off a great semester,” said Leight. “I am extremely honored to receive this scholarship, and see it as a testimony to the passion I have for this field of study. It makes me even more excited to continue learning and growing my career.”
A native of East Greenville, Pennsylvania, and a Schreyer Scholar, Leight has been busy both in the classroom and the community. She is a member of Alpha Pi Mu, the industrial engineering honor society, and was recently elected as president of the society for the 2017-18 academic year.
Leight has been an active member of the Penn State chapter of the Changing Health Attitudes and Actions to Recreate Girls (CHAARG) program since 2015. CHAARG is an all-girls health and fitness club that focuses on igniting a passion for health and fitness. Leight runs weekly meet-ups with a group of girls as a small group coordinator for the organization, and she leads them in workouts and other physical activities.
She is also involved in the Women in Engineering Program, serving as a facilitated study group leader for a physics course and a volunteer at the group’s Girl Scouts Saturdays, during which Penn State students help local elementary and middle school students learn about engineering and other STEM fields. She is also active within the Schreyer Honors College, where she is a mentor to incoming scholars that plan to study industrial engineering.
Leight has been working with Professor Ling Rothrock in his Human Performance Assessment and Modeling Lab since the fall of 2016 as part of the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering’s undergraduate research program. She is working with Rothrock on her honors thesis, which involves using statistical process control charts to analyze the effectiveness of simulation-based training in the workplace.
This summer, Leight will return to Lutron Electronics for her second consecutive summer internship at the company’s headquarters in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania.
Leight is Six Sigma Green Belt-certified and plans to graduate with her bachelor’s degree in May 2018.
The mission of the Material Handling Education Foundation is to promote the study of material handling, logistics and the supply chain by exposing students and educators to the industry through financial support. Since 1976, the foundation has awarded more than $2.5 million in scholarships and grants to students at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.