George Percivall’s welcome-to-UIUC moment happened at Loomis Lab, not long after the junior physics major transferred in from Eastern Illinois.
“I met with an administrative assistant seeking guidance about the department. She startled me with the blunt statement that ‘most students who transfer into the physics department don’t make it to graduation,’” he recalls.
Ouch.
“I don’t know if the statement was true but it woke me up to the challenge ahead.
“The next two-and-a-half years in the department profoundly increased my cognitive abilities and established habits that have served me well in my professional career,” says Percivall, who went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in electrical engineering and now serves as chief technical officer and chief engineer at the Open Geospatial Consortium in Annapolis, Md.
