Kareem Garriga Francis was a senior at Sparkman High School when a super outbreak of deadly tornadoes hit Northern Alabama on April 27, 2011. "My neighborhood was blocked off on all sides," he says. "No one could get in or out for two weeks." Nor was he able to mail his acceptance letter to the university he planned to attend, which ended up wait listing him as a result. Instead, the Puerto Rican native enrolled in UAH - and once there, he was able to complete a complex engineering project he'd been working on for over a year: building a multi-touch table. "I don't think I could have done that where I was planning to go!" he laughs.