Family enhances new engineering practice facility to "honor dad"

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 When engineering students and faculty look at the new Engineering Practice Facility rising from the ground across from Sarkeys Energy Center, they see an opportunity where one day classroom knowledge will take on real world challenges. When Kelly Rawl Guziejka and family look at the facility, they see “Dad’s building.” In 2006, ExxonMobil honored its former CEO Lawrence G. Rawl with a $5 million gift to the University of Oklahoma Foundation for the nation’s first engineering practice facility. The ExxonMobil Lawrence G. Rawl Engineering Practice Facility will offer 41,000 square-feet to engineering students of all disciplines, including five bay areas where they can design and build projects. Rawl, himself a 1952 OU petroleum engineering graduate, served as chairman of the board and CEO of Exxon Corporation from 1987 until his retirement in 1993. He died in 2005, at the age of 76. Now the Rawl family has added its own gift of $350,000 to the facility to inspire young engineers before they get to college. The LGR Foundation Center for Teaching and Engineering Practice will give kindergartners through 12th-graders a room geared to age-appropriate engineering experiments, allowing imaginations and hands to work in tandem. “In order to stay nationally and globally competitive, our state must strengthen our youths' interest in science and math,” said OU Engineering Dean Tom Landers. “We must step up our efforts to recruit, retain and graduate new generations of engineers and to inspire bright Oklahoma elementary through high school students to consider engineering, science and math as viable career paths.” The LGR Foundation Center is designed to do just that. “It’s going to be the center of our K-12 outreach” said P. Simin Pulat, associate dean of Undergraduate Education and the Howard and Suzanne Kauffmann Chair. “It’s going to be the room where kids get to build robots and canoes.” Pulat said the center, located on the second-floor, will be home to K-12 visitors and freshman orientation course projects for the more than 400 incoming College of Engineering students each year. Flexible, reconfigurable furniture will provide the ability to host hands-on engineering experiments, fun and inspiring presentations showcasing math and science and even lunch for visiting children. The idea for the gift evolved when the Rawl family visited OU’s Norman campus for the announcement of the ExxonMobil Lawrence G. Rawl Engineering Practice Facility. When they were looking over plans for the building, widow Gail Williamson Rawl and Rawl’s children, Guziejka, Jana Rawl Nichols, Vincent L. Rawl and Michael M. Rawl decided to make their own gift to the facility. Before his death, Rawl established the LGR Foundation, of which his children are now board members. The room will be named the LGR Foundation Center for Teaching and Engineering Practice. The Engineering Practice Facility is part of a multi-phase plan for a comprehensive engineering quadrangle to anchor the northeast corner of OU’s Norman campus. “When the yellow school buses pull up to the building, this room is where they will go for the fun stuff,” said Pulat. “This is where they will come to see and learn what engineering is all about.” Posted in OU Foundation newsletter, Priority

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