Triple Scholar's Unlikely Journey to Engineering

In high school, if someone had told University of Pittsburgh engineering scholar Kaye Baron that he would be an award-winning student after a successful career in the U.S. Coast Guard, he probably would have laughed. The Seattle native preferred playing music to studying and studied the least amount of math possible. Instead of college, Baron planned to make it as a musician.

After graduating high school, though, he realized that “it could be pretty difficult for me to make a living that way.” When he turned 24, Baron sensed it was time to find another path, as he said, to “be the person I wanted to see. I wanted to give back to the world.” He began looking for a new opportunity and found the U.S. Coast Guard.  

After bootcamp, Baron was stationed in Astoria, Oregon, a small town on the Columbia River. There, he found himself scraping barnacles off enormous buoys and climbing inside to clean them, doing a job that Mike Rowe made famous on his TV show Dirty Jobs. Of this new situation, Baron said, “I had a great time.”

Baron thrived and took on new responsibilities. He began attending aviation technician school, where he finished first in his class. He moved to Coast Guard Air Station San Francisco and worked as an avionics electrical technician, fixing components on airplanes and helicopters. He loves to fly and was an aircrewman and hoist operator as well, helping to pull people out of the ocean and assisting during wildfires and hurricanes.

Every day, Baron was problem solving and troubleshooting. It seemed like he was always fixing a helicopter’s servo component, so issue-prone and quick to cause problems, and he began thinking that he wanted to solve larger systemic problems. He started teaching himself math. “On the side, I taught myself college algebra up through multivariable calculus,” he said, “because I started thinking of pursuing engineering.”

In 2021, Baron left the Coast Guard, where he was credited for recording 606 flight hours and saving 18 lives. Through his service he had, as he desired, given back. Now he was ready to make a difference through innovation.    

Baron was drawn to the University of Pittsburgh and how accommodating they were to his veteran status. He liked Pittsburgh’s lower cost of living and its rich history in power and energy. With his cat Louise, he drove east, bought a house, and, 15 years after finishing high school, stepped onto a college campus.

At Pitt, Baron has excelled academically, but it wasn’t until his junior year that he found his focus. In the Coast Guard, as he fixed systems, he would find himself thinking more about the power that had been harnessed so they could function. After taking the course Power Fundamentals with Robert Kerestes, Director of Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Programs and Associate Professor at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, he knew that his winding path had led him to the right place. He took Power Conversion Theory. Then he enrolled in Power Quality.

Kerestes, seeing Baron’s work ethic and success in and outside of classroom, told him about a scholarship opportunity through the Institute of Electronics and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Baron applied for the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus. In addition to receiving this scholarship, he earned the IEEE PES John W. Estey Outstanding Scholar award and the IEEE PES G. Ray Ekenstam Memorial Award, given to veterans pursuing a degree in engineering.

“He’s the first triple scholar they’ve had for the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus program,” said Kerestes, himself a veteran of the United States Navy (Active Duty and Naval Reserve), having served as Third Class Petty Officer, and who has published research on medium voltage DC architecture and infrastructure and energy storage systems. “That’s pretty historic.”

Baron’s accomplishments continue an impressive streak for Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. “Kaye winning the John W. Estey award gives us six winners in the last eight years,” said Kerestes. “Having a top scholar six of the last eight years is amazing.”

For a student who never planned to attend college, this recognition has affirmed Baron’s intentional approach. As he said, “You don’t have to be a genius. You just need to be sincere and apply yourself… you know, wake up every day and think, ‘What should I do?’ And then do that thing.”

That thing, for Baron, involves electric power engineering. He has started taking master’s level courses and plans to pursue a research master’s degree at Pitt. Where that ultimately leads, he’s unsure, but he plans to use his engineering education to give back to the world. He is still driven by a desire to do, as he said, “something bigger than myself.”