Students find the WOW factor in Karwowski

Hugon Karwowski pushes his students to work as hard as they can and is constantly trying to get the best out of them – whether they like it or not.

Most of the time, they do.

Karwowski’s Physics 352 (“Electronics II”) class, for example, is so popular that enrollment has nearly doubled in the past two years.

One reason for the class’s popularity is that it is a foundational course for students pursuing the biomedical engineering track in the new curriculum in applied sciences and engineering  (CASE) in the College of Arts and Sciences.

CASE presents opportunities for students to pursue careers addressing the pressing technical challenges confronting the world in areas such as nanomedicine, alternative energy, environmental protection and cyber security.

Another reason for the class’s popularity is Karwowski himself. In his 25-year career, he has repeatedly distinguished himself as a teacher adept at unlocking the potential within his students by challenging them in ways that force them to dig deeper.

“Students are not challenged often enough,” Karwowski said. “Therefore, they don’t know how good they really are, or how bad they are. What is it that you can do? What is it that you cannot do? In either case, this is very important to know.”

And some find that they are in the wrong place, he said. “Somebody should have told them a year ago, ‘Look, maybe the most difficult major on campus is not for you.’”

Other students, when pushed to work harder than ever before, will discover they are capable of far more than they thought possible.

No matter their ability level, students who do not already have a work ethic have little chance of surviving Karwowski’s class without developing one.

A case in point is the Lockfest event that students in his digital electronics class held on March 5 in Phillips Hall.

The lock in this instance is a free-standing sophisticated electronic circuit designed and built to protect unauthorized entry into a computer system.

Leading up to the event, Karwowski’s students spent about three weeks working on their lock designs. They spent countless hours in the lab during that time, taking the designs from paper sketches to computer design to actually building and testing the locks.

During the “pick-the-lock” challenge, faculty and student colleagues had 75 minutes to try to crack the code and open the locks. More than 60 professors, grad students, friends and parents tried to break 41 different lock designs.

“The alumni of the class were most successful and broke about a dozen locks,” Karwowski said. “Most locks were not broken at all.”

He said the point of the event was to give his students a long-term project that forced them to think ahead and organize their work. At the same time, the project allowed them to develop practical skills in hard-core electronics that would be useful to them later.

Karwowski’s assertion about the importance of what he teaches would draw little argument from students like Will Eldridge, a junior from Hickory, who is interested both in medical school and getting a Ph.D. to develop biomedical instruments.

Eldridge said Karwowski tells the class what he expects of them and leaves them alone to figure out how to accomplish it. It is through figuring out things on your own, he said, that learning takes place. And in the process of completing the task, he is learning practical skills that he can add to his resume, from circuit design to soldering.

As for his lock, 55 people tried to break it. One succeeded, and that was a fellow classmate.

Frances Ni, a junior from Cary who attended the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, said no one broke her lock. Both students used a multi-layered defense based on a series of locks that, even if figured out, had to be entered within a specified time sequence.

Both Eldridge and Ni know Karwowski is pushing them to the limits of their ability. That is all right with them, because, like Karwowski, they want to find out if they are up to the challenge.

But his students also appreciate the fact that Karwowski pushes himself equally hard. Students who go into the lab on weekends are not surprised to find Karwowski there, too.

He also makes himself available to students by responding to e-mails that stream in at all hours. It is not uncommon for him to answer 40 e-mails from students in a single evening at home.

Karwowski’s dedication to his students earned him a 2008 Johnston Teaching Excellence Award, one of the top honors given for undergraduate teaching at the University. His devotion to teaching and care for students has also been recognized with a Tanner Award and a Bowman and Gordon Gray professorship.

Karwowski said, “I operate under the false impression that what I have to teach them is the most important thing they will ever have to learn – and that I am the one who is going to straighten them up if they are not already straightened up yet.”

No doubt, many of his students would agree.