Teaching Engineering

In case you are wondering, my co-author Louis Everett is MIA. He has promised to begin blogging soon, though. He is just very busy with some of his administrative responsibilities as chairman of the mechanical engineering department here at UTEP.

For our students reading this, oh yes, we engineering faculty do “other” things outside the classroom. Louis Everett, for example, is the chair of the ME department – this is a lot of hard work for him; to put it mildly, the buck stops with him as the chair of the department. I, for example, am the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Industrial Engineering, which is an international research journal in industrial engineering with worldwide circulation. Professors from all over the world attempt to publish their research in this journal through a peer-reviewed process. It is hard work managing the journal.

Engineering faculty also write blogs like this, write research proposals and attempt to win grant money for researching interesting engineering problems, serve as consultants for solving real world engineering problems, travel to conferences to present their research work (only if the conference is in a really nice place like Hawaii or Puerto Rico), work on developing and keeping standards on curriculum, develop new courses to benefit you, supervise undergraduate students and graduate students in research and learning, run research laboratories, perform service to the department by being advisors, serve UTEP and the community we live in through their activities as professors, and, have their families that they spend their time with (although our families would have trouble agreeing with this one).

I bet many of you did not realize that your engineering professors do all of the above and more with the 24 hours they have. Of course, you are why we do what we do.

If you want to know more about any of the above things I do, come talk to me, and I’ll be more than glad to share some neat stories with you. Or talk to Louis Everett. If you can find him. He is MIA.