Re-engineering Engineering
Strengthening a Pillar of Northeastern
By Eileen K. McCluskey
In a room inside the Snell Engineering Center, several rows of computers
face one wall. But turn around, and you'll see an equal number of rows
of student desks facing the other wall, where a lecturer's table stands
in front of a blackboard and screen. Is the room a computer lab, or is
it a classroom?
It's both, and it's Allen Soyster's dream "learning center."
The dean of the College of Engineering was inspired to create it after
returning from a reconnaissance field trip last spring to the venerable
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, the oldest engineering
school in the country.
"I was in one of their new electrical engineering classrooms. It
held twenty or twenty-five people. It was an amphitheater setting,"
says Soyster. A key feature of the Rensselaer classroom is that the students'
chairs swivel. When facing forward, students see the lecturer and screen
or blackboard. But behind each seat is a personal computer, used for engineering
problems and exercises. "The design of it was that when you turn your
chair, like this,"-Soyster swivels around to dramatize-"you go
from passive learning to a place where you try [an engineering exercise]
yourself. It was integrating the laboratory into the lecture, and you did
it simply by turning your chair," he says.
This melding of instruction and lab strikes chords with the dean, who
says "this has always been an issue that has never worked very well
in my experience, where you have a lecture, then next Thursday you have
the laboratory." The connection between the two, he continues, "was
distant in time and space.
"So when I came back, this design evolved." Soyster walks
through the sparkling-new Engineering Computer Assisted Learning Center,
which opened in January. Angled tables terrace from the back row down to
a central well. On every other table sit souped-up personal computers,
thirty-four in all. Students crowd the room even between classes, spreading
their notebooks out on the front-facing tables, and swiveling around to
run calculations. "I envision a time in the future when all [engineering]
classrooms will be like this," Soyster says.
That's just the sort of forward-looking attitude the College of Engineering
must have, according to President Richard M. Freeland. From the start of
his tenure in 1996, Freeland has vowed to build Northeastern into a "national
leader." And he points to engineering as "one of the pillars
on which the entire structure of Northeastern rests. There is no strong
future for Northeastern without a strong College of Engineering,"
he says.
Enter Soyster, who came to N.U. two years ago from the highly regarded
department of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Pennsylvania
State University. Changes are under way. They are the shifts in the college's
foundations intended to correct for unfavorable times and decisions that
tumbled the college from its once-premier position in the arena of engineering
education.
It's a bit like rebuilding in the aftermath of an earthquake. The College
of Engineering, in the wake of a difficult decade and in the midst of daunting
competition, is seeking to reclaim-and even surpass-its position amid engineering's
educational giants. The new dean and his colleagues and staff are building
state-of-the-art classrooms. Setting up new laboratories. Ramping up enrollment,
while simultaneously sifting applicants more rigorously than ever. Grappling
with fundamental issues such as financing, infrastructure, curriculum,
and competitiveness.
Soyster's game plan for the college's reconstruction focuses on six
areas of activity: recruiting better students, attracting star faculty,
constructing new and better facilities, boosting research activity, garnering
support from industry and alumni, and strengthening the ties between co-op
experience and classroom lessons. Shoring up these areas will be a herculean
task, but it's what's required if this pillar of Northeastern is to regain
its strength.
Cutthroat Competition
No part of Soyster's game plan is a sure thing in the intensely competitive
arena of Massachusetts higher education, however. "There is no place
in North America, maybe no place on Earth, that has as many high-quality
colleges and universities" as Massachusetts, says Freeland. Among
the eleven eastern Massachusetts schools offering engineering majors, he
notes, "We've got MIT, which sets the standard; also Tufts, BU; and
we've got strong engineering schools at UMass Amherst and UMass Lowell,
[as well as] Worcester Polytechnic-these are all substantial competitors
right on our doorstep." But wait, we haven't yet mentioned the new
kid on the block: "The big competitor everyone's talking about is
[the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering] at Babson," says Freeland,
"with a start-up grant that's two-thirds the size of our endowment
after a hundred years." Needham-based Olin College, funded by $200
million from the F. W. Olin Foundation, plans to offer a free education
to top engineering students from around the country, starting in 2001.
For Northeastern to attract accomplished students in such a superheated
competitive climate is no small feat. But in N.U.'s favor are dual booms
in undergraduate engineering applications and the job market for engineers.
These two factors are in marked contrast to the situation during the early
'90s recession, when applications to the College of Engineering plummeted
and the college's reputation suffered as a result.
Although inquiring about the college's standing may raise the ire of
an occasional administrator ("Who says our reputation has gone down?"
steams one), there isn't a department chair within the college who would
deny the fact of the reputation's downslide. They may argue points of fairness
in that public perception, or tell you that their department has actually
gained in stature, even while the college as a whole slipped a few notches.
But all in all, it's unanimous: times were turbulent, and this college
took a tumble, along with many others.
Arvin Grabel is a professor and interim chair of electrical and computer
engineering, one of the college's four constituent departments. In his
thirty years of teaching at Northeastern, Grabel has witnessed the university's
good times and bad. "One of the things that hurt us was the university's
admissions policy from the mid-'70s to the late '80s," he recalls.
He notes that this policy reflected the university's historical mission
of access, but says wryly, "that doesn't mean you take everyone in
the world."
Coupled with the liberal admissions policy was a "tremendous boom
in the early to late '80s in engineering across the country," Grabel
recalls. "The engineering school at Northeastern grew beyond the capacity
of the faculty and facilities to handle the student body that we had. And
right after that you had the demographic downturn: the number of eighteen-year-olds
dropped. And that corresponded exactly with the economy of the whole of
New England declining. But more importantly, all you heard were the technical
companies downsizing."
Engineering applications dropped in the recession, and the College of
Engineering "suffered more than most in that other schools were more
selective," says Charles Finn, director of the School of Engineering
Technology, a fifth component of the college that trains technicians to
work in engineering-heavy fields.
John Cipolla Jr., professor and chair of mechanical, industrial, and
manufacturing engineering, waxes philosophical about a decline in the college's
reputation. "It depends," he says, "on how you define reputation
and who you're polling. As a research center, the College of Engineering's
reputation, focused in electrical engineering, has steadily increased"
over the years. "There was a period when that reputation was diminished,"
he admits, because of the admissions policy.
But now Northeastern is growing more selective. The university instituted
a first-ever waiting list for freshman admissions last fall. And engineering
leads the way: average SAT test scores for engineering freshmen reached
1,170 last fall, their highest level ever. That's nearly a twenty-five-point
increase over 1997. The average for all freshmen entering the university
last fall was 1,088-a 105-point improvement since 1991.
Better Students
Partnered with rising admissions standards are Soyster's goals for higher
enrollment in engineering. "We want to increase the number and quality
of students coming in. This is our dominant, number-one objective,"
says the dean. He has a green light to do both. A draft report on the proper
size of the various colleges and departments, requested last fall by President
Freeland, recommends major growth in engineering enrollment over the next
decade, in tandem with increasing admissions standards.
Both targets are already being hit. The college was shooting for 325
entering freshmen in 199798. It got 338. Soyster plans to reach "a
steady state" of 400 entering freshmen per year by the year 2000.
As for caliber of students, "If we had something like an average SAT
score of 1,200, we'd be very happy," he says. "Actually, the
scores we have [now] are quite good compared to a lot of engineering schools."
These targets exclude the School of Engineering Technology, which is
less selective than the rest of the engineering college. SAT scores for
incoming SET freshmen in 1997 were 1,004, among the lowest at the university.
But enrollments at the SET are on the mark. Eighty-six new students came
through the doors in 1997. Soyster's looking for 100 annually by the year
2000.
To net better-qualified students, engineering's recruiters are ranging
farther afield than ever before. The college is setting up recruiting receptions
for high schoolers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida, according to
Richard Scranton, associate dean for undergraduate programs. Scranton's
office went so far as to employ a national direct-mail campaign to find
high school students interested in majoring in engineering. It apparently
has worked: half of the current freshman class comes from out of state.
The farther-flung recruitment serves to outflank the college's local
competition; UMass Lowell and Worcester Polytechnic, in particular, have
hurt Northeastern in recent years, making inroads into the College of Engineering's
traditional Massachusetts recruiting grounds, officials say. Going out
of state is also in keeping with Freeland's goal of establishing N.U. as
a national university.
New scholarship funds are a key tool the college is using to address
issues of student-body size and caliber. To begin with, the university
is increasing scholarship aid across the board, both for incoming freshmen
and upperclassmen. On top of that, the College of Engineering has its own
$4 million endowment for scholarships-but most of those go to students
already attending N.U. A significant new aid program, the Dean's Scholarships,
benefits incoming students. These five-year, half-tuition scholarships
are aimed at "the brightest possible students," Soyster says.
Twenty-five of this cream of the crop-about a third of the students approached-were
harvested for the fall of '97, due in part to the personal involvement
of the deans and engineering faculty, who telephoned the students and their
parents to offer the awards.
First-year student Jamie Marie Thomas, from Garden City Park, New York,
is one of those sought-after pupils. N.U.'s wasn't the only scholarship
offered, but it was the best. Thomas, who plans on majoring in civil engineering
and minoring in architecture, came to N.U. primarily "because the
co-op program sounded really good. The question [by potential employers]
always is, 'How many years of experience do you have?' With co-op jobs,
I'll get that experience," she says.
A second new batch of grants aimed at incoming students, the Legacy
Scholarships, will debut in force this fall. Awarded for five years at
$5,000 annually, the Legacies are bankrolled by engineering alumni. Soyster's
forays around the country, beating the bushes for contributions, have already
netted $1.4 million, enough to endow ten scholarships for 199899.
The first Legacy scholarship was actually awarded last fall. The success
of the dean's early solicitations has buoyed his hopes of eventually raising
$10 million for the Legacy program.
Freeland feels strongly about using financial aid incentives to attract
the best possible student body. Support along these lines "must be
substantial," he declares. "So from the moment I arrived on campus,
I've made an effort to reverse the pattern of decline in engineering. I'm
totally supportive of [Soyster's] emphasis. We have invested in it, in
terms of financial aid, and we'll continue to invest in it."
Star Faculty
Faculty respected in their fields are a prerequisite for becoming a
great university. As President Freeland poses it, "How do I project
to the rest of the world, in the strongest possible way, that Northeastern
is a place that's about quality, in addition to being about access and
convenience? There is no stronger way to dramatize those changes than by
appointing to faculty truly distinguished, nationally recognized scholars
in their disciplines."
Starting at the top, Freeland chose Soyster as dean because he saw him
as an educational leader who would invest the time and effort to bring
the College of Engineering back. "The first thing that struck me about
Allen Soyster," Freeland says, "was that he had a very strong
sense of quality in education. He [also] has an unusual combination of
very high standards, very strong commitment to quality, and very powerful
balance of interdisciplinary undergraduate education and pedagogy on the
one side and graduate education and research on the other side. On top
of that," adds the president, "it seems to me that Allen Soyster
is a long-termer. He commits himself to an institution, and then stays
there and does the job."
One of Soyster's earliest acts as dean was to convince Albert Sacco
Jr., E'73, HD'96, to return to campus. Sacco, a renowned scientist and
an astronaut who flew as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle
Columbia in 1995, came to the chemical engineering department last summer
as the George A. Snell distinguished chair in engineering. What lured him
back to N.U. from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute was the opportunity
to head a major research center, the newly created Center for Advanced
Microgravity Materials Processing.
CAMMP, as the center is known, is one of sixteen research programs named
by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as commercial space
centers, each of which focuses on a different area of research important
to the space agency. With Sacco's presence, Northeastern beat out MIT and
many other universities for that designation. CAMMP's specialty is creating
materials in low gravity or microgravity that will be useful to industry
on Earth. Several big companies have already signed on as partners in the
venture, among them E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and United Technologies
Corporation. NASA will provide $1 million annually to the center for six
years and has reserved room for CAMMP's experiments on three upcoming space
missions: space shuttle flights this October and next January and the international
space venture in 2000. NASA's commitment to N.U. is "gigantic,"
Sacco says.
Sacco is the College of Engineering's first star hire, but doubtless
not the last. One of the first Trustee Professorships-a $25 million program
announced at Freeland's inauguration that will result in eight endowed
chairs-will bring a high-profile new faculty member to the mechanical,
industrial, and manufacturing engineering department. A search committee
has been formed and is on schedule to complete its task by this fall, Soyster
says.
Whoever the new professor is, expectations are clear. Freeland says
he wants "people whose work is read and known and whose name is on
the lips of CEOs and R and D scientists working in industry. I want to
celebrate the practice-oriented, applied nature of Northeastern at the
same time that I want to bring a sense of academic distinction."
Another search committee is seeking a replacement for John Proakis,
who recently returned to the faculty after thirteen years as electrical
and computer engineering department chair, during which he built the department
into the college's strongest. Electrical and computer engineering accounted
for almost a quarter of all sponsored research at N.U. last year and ranks
in the top ten percent of American electrical engineering departments for
sponsored research income. The national search, which drew candidates from
other universities and outside academia, had been narrowed down to six
finalists by mid-February. (Grabel, the department's acting chair, removed
himself from consideration early on, quipping, "I have told the department
members on the search committee that their raises depend on getting a replacement
by the end of the year.")
But the college's hopes aren't pinned solely on new hires. Four young
faculty members have recently won prestigious Early Career Development
grants from the National Science Foundation: Jeffrey Hopwood of electrical
and computer engineering; Jacqueline Isaacs and Achille Messac of mechanical,
industrial, and manufacturing engineering; and Sara Wadia-Fascetti of the
civil and environmental engineering department. They join seven other faculty
members who had previously received the award. Early Career Development
grants are good for a minimum of $200,000 over four years.
New Facilities
State-of-the-art facilities are a necessity in any engineering school,
but especially for one determined to elevate its reputation. "We need
to make it clear that our program is very attractive," says Soyster.
"The laboratories and work experiences that our students have are
going to be a high priority for us."
The dean's dream computer lab-and-classroom isn't the only newly refurbished
space in the Snell Engineering Center. An adjacent room has been outfitted
with powerful new UNIX-based computers. Together with a third computer
room, these form the Engineering Computer Center. The 4,000-square-foot
space, equipped with nearly ninety computers and designed with future growth
in mind, consolidates the previous warren of computer rooms spread about
the building.
Another new engineering lab is on the drawing boards. The two-part lab
would allow undergraduates to design, build, and test prototype products
with the latest techniques and equipment. Students would start in a computer-aided
studio, using mechanical design software to devise products, and then would
send the specifications electronically to an adjacent manufacturing workshop
that mechanical engineering's Cipolla envisions as "a model shop,
fully outfitted with hand tools and workbenches."
By mid-February the college had raised $600,000 in foundation aid-about
two-thirds of the sum needed to build the lab. Cipolla hopes to begin construction
on a design manufacturing lab by next spring.
Another project in the works is a communications lab, possibly to be
created in collaboration with neighboring Emerson College, for engineering
students to hone their speaking and writing skills. The lab would answer
a long-standing, industry-driven demand for engineers who can effectively
communicate what they know and why it's important to business, Soyster
says. In a nod to Olin College's intimidating start-up funding, he says
the move to make the lab happen now "is probably accelerated by knowing
that others are doing the same thing with a good deal more resources than
we can."
Overshadowing all of these worthy efforts is the Egan Engineering/Science
Research Center. This gleaming facility houses more than a dozen laboratories
in its four stories, for research projects conducted by the engineering,
physics, chemistry, and computer science departments and some of the university's
research centers. But that the building's use is limited to faculty and
graduate students concerns Soyster. "That building ought to be a place
for many of our undergraduates to learn and do work," he has said.
"I do want to look at more innovative ways of using the labs and the
space and bring more undergraduate students in contact with some of the
state-of-the-art equipment and ideas."
Research Activity
If the College of Engineering is to succeed in boosting its status,
then research is perhaps the single most important aspect to emphasize.
"Nothing improves your reputation more than having high-quality research
people. Nothing. Not even kudos for how well you teach undergraduates,"
Cipolla says. "My principal goal is to develop a national research
presence, and everything else will follow."
In fact, the college's research program is already on the rise; sponsored
research funding now tops $20 million. More than half of that sum was awarded
in 199697 alone.
Such prominence is a recent phenomenon for Northeastern. "When
I joined Northeastern fifteen years ago, it was primarily a teaching institution,"
says Yaman Yener, associate dean and director of the Graduate School of
Engineering. "Now we are becoming a premier research-based school,
while the teaching has never declined." civil and environmental engineering
department chair Mishac Yegian, who recently received a $170,000 grant
from the National Science Foundation for his earthquake-related research,
agrees: "Freeland is sending us full speed in [the research] direction.
I think it's an exciting time. We're a better college than before."
You haven't seen anything yet, Soyster promises. The dean plans "a
significant push to have our faculty more engaged in scholarship and publication
activities. I'm going to set some very clear expectations that [research]
is a responsibility across the board. If you're not actively engaged in
scholarship, then you're not doing a complete job."
This accent on research is not only about raising the college's and
the university's prominence. Scholarship also strengthens classroom teaching,
Soyster contends: "If you're not involved regularly in uncovering
knowledge and writing about things, ultimately your impact in the classroom
diminishes."
But there are different kinds of scholarship. In keeping with Northeastern's
practice-oriented nature, President Freeland wants faculty to focus on
practical research. "Most academics do their work and write their
theses for other academics that publish in scholarly journals and are read
only by other academics. I want people whose work is read by practitioners-people
in engineering whose work is read and known by managers in high-tech companies."
Soyster seconds the value of practical research. "When I'm in a
class and I can tell the students about something that happened last week
at a particular company, then the students perk up. There's a certain amount
of, 'Well, if this is the way they're really going at it, then maybe I'd
better listen,' " he says.
Industry and Alumni Support
Soyster cut his teeth at a university that emphasizes partnerships with
industry. Now that he's at N.U., the dean sees the Boston area as a bed
of oysters waiting for the harvester. He wants "close collaboration
between our engineering faculty and industry," he says. "Our
faculty need to have more outreach with local industry and business."
To foster links with the business world, the college hired Christopher
Cassidy last summer to be its first industrial relations liaison. "We've
never had formalized industrial relations activity," Cassidy notes.
Even so, thirty-nine corporations invested in research with the college
in the past year, among them area giants such as Analog Devices, EMC Corporation,
and Raytheon Company (all of which are headed by Northeastern grads). Cassidy
hopes to increase that investment by pursuing goals that are mutually beneficial
to faculty and industry, such as commercialization of intellectual property.
Chemical engineering's Sacco sees his CAMMP program as an industrial
magnet. Through the center, "industry can look at the long-term picture"
in product research and development, according to Sacco-an opportunity
shareholder-beholden corporations don't often get. And with "a very
small investment, they can get into space," he adds, to participate
in the experimental development of specialized crystals, for instance.
Though not everyone can draw industry interest like CAMMP, Soyster thinks
all of the college's research programs should mix with the real world.
"Research programs should have some input from the commercial sector
where people are trying to make things and make money," he says. "It's
important that we have a greater mixing of our faculty with the people
who are ultimately recruiting our students."
The opportunities for mixing aren't limited to research programs. Two
undergraduate courses bring industry representatives-engineering alumni-together
with students. In these "capstone courses," seniors integrate
their five years of learning in final design projects. A team of five to
six students, working under a faculty member's supervision, makes a product
meant to solve an engineering problem or improve upon existing items. Each
team works out the design, chooses the materials, builds and tests a prototype,
and then presents its baby (with accompanying literature) to a panel of
alumni judges.
This past year saw the third annual competition for the mechanical,
industrial, and manufacturing engineering capstone course. Says a happy
Cipolla, "The judges were flabbergasted by the quality of the presentations."
Robert Depasqua, E'71, wrote in a testimonial, "The level of the presentations
that I heard today literally blew me away." Frank Jackson, E'84, wrote,
"I am very impressed at the level of expertise and . . . thoroughness
with which each of you have attacked your designs." Jackson added
that the teamwork evidenced in the final products and their accompanying
presentations were "what employers are looking for when they are hiring."
The winning students in the electrical and computer engineering capstone
course, which started up last fall, beat out nine other teams to win a
$1,000 prize for their project, "Design of an Invested Pendulum Control
System." In 1996, a team of mechanical engineering students took its
product to a national contest, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers's
Comparative Motion and Control Design Engineering Contest, and placed second
among top engineering schools.
Besides bringing alumni back to campus for the capstone competitions,
Soyster has been using several other means to strengthen graduates' bonds
with the college. His office is setting up an alumni society for the entire
college (to overlay existing departmental clubs); recently issued the first
installment of a college magazine, NU Engineer; and is planning a museum-type
exhibition of alumni inventions, patents, and innovations. Soyster also
expects big things from alumni, and not only money. In an interview a year
ago with Northeastern University Alumni Magazine, he said he wanted the number
of alumni who are members of the National Academy of Engineering to increase
substantially. "We have something like 35,000 alumni, and we ought
to have, it seems to me, at least fifteen or twenty nominated for the national
academy," he said.
Co-op and the Classroom
Strengthening co-op is the final plank in Soyster's building plan. Co-op
remains Northeastern's "signature program," Freeland says, and
Soyster has called co-op the university's great competitive advantage.
Many other engineering schools across the country are only now trying to
form co-op programs, the dean says. N.U. has a hundred-year head start.
But Northeastern's co-op program is not without its knots. Too often,
Freeland says, "once a student is out on co-op they're gone, they're
just working. And we're not helping them leverage their co-op experience
as a learning experience." The president sees some instructors linking
co-op to the classroom, "but not yet in sufficient numbers. It needs
to become a way of life here. I want every faculty member designing every
session of every course thinking, 'These students have been on co-op. What
have they encountered and learned on co-op, and how can I take advantage
of that in the classroom?' "
Soyster similarly observes, "I ask the faculty, and myself also-if
you're a professor here, do you teach any differently than if you were
in another school that doesn't have co-op? I've asked several people, and
there hasn't been a precise answer." The bottom line, he has concluded,
"is 'no, we're not doing anything different.' "
All that is going to change, Freeland vows. The cooperative education
department is currently undergoing a restructuring, aimed at more tightly
linking co-op coordinators with the university's various colleges and departments.
Freeland also thinks there's work to be done on the employer end of co-op:
"I want to engage the co-op employers in a greater sense of responsibility
for the students' learning."
Already new ideas are being tried. Engineering associate dean Scranton
is developing a five-course program in which co-op instructors will team-teach
with engineering faculty. The five courses are meant to complement the
more technical courses for undergraduates.
Perhaps most significantly, engineering faculty are willing, even enthusiastic,
about improving co-op, Soyster says. "I don't see a lot of inertia"
on co-op reform, he says. "I think, by and large, this is a great
faculty and they're anxious to succeed on a higher level."
Corn Seeds on Cement
Assume that the College of Engineering succeeds in attracting crackerjack
students and faculty, builds better facilities, raises its research profile,
gleans alumni and industry support, and bolsters connections between class
work and co-op employment. These advances preordain great expenditures,
and therefore greater demand on the university's resources. Success, in
short, carries a price. Some at the college feel uneasy on this score.
Sacco, for one, says that if engineering is to go up the "academic
ivy, the university will have to make investments in the college."
He's talking about "not just an attitude change, but a financial,
long-term investment."
Sacco has said on more than one occasion, "I like to take risks,"
and that Northeastern is "probably a good gamble." Still, he
is concerned that "the risk is that Northeastern may not have the
infrastructure to handle" the requirements that come from having major
research centers such as CAMMP in its midst.
"We're trying to boost [the college] from a very modest position
in the research community to a premier position," Sacco says. "CAMMP
is a nationally recognized research center. Northeastern is poised"
to blast off, he adds, "and they'll either emerge, or they'll slide
back."
The College of Engineering's work has just begun, agrees Ralph Buonopane,
chair of the chemical engineering department. "Al Sacco's coming is
a step toward improving our graduate program," he says, because "individuals
are what attract graduate students. We've turned a decline around, but
we're still at the bottom of the hill and we've got a long way to go.
"We need to add faculty," Buonopane says. But with star faculty
must come space for them to work in. "In order to attract a chemical
engineering researcher, you need the lab facilities. If we already have
them we have to keep them, and if we don't have them we have to get them."
Buonopane wonders if the university will support his plans. "That
remains to be seen," he says. "We've asked for it; we haven't
gotten any answer back."
Sacco echoes Buonopane. The college must "grow the departments,"
says Sacco, noting that "chemical engineering is at least two times
low in staff. But you also must supply a first-rate lab, and other supports:
excellent scholars, excellent teachers. If you do this, you see change
quickly. If you don't bring them in, it's like throwing corn seeds on cement."
Still, Allen Soyster believes benefits are inherent in the risks. Whether,
when the dust settles, witnesses will see the College of Engineering emerge
as a winner in a high-stakes game, Soyster, for one, sees many opportunities
in this time of reconstruction and restoration. He says, "What's terribly
important is the process. One has to develop a habit of feeling that we
can compete."
Eileen K. McCluskey, MBA'86, is a freelance writer in Watertown,
Massachusetts.
Return to top of
page