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MIT Alums Teach Engineering Students ‘Real World’ Skills by Lauren Clark
Each January, about two dozen alumni volunteer as teaching assistants at one of two week-long, corporate-style training seminars for MIT sophomores enrolled in the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP). A mentoring and internship program, UPOP helps students develop engineering, business, and interpersonal skills that will give them a leg up when they begin their careers. Nicknamed “boot camp,” each seminar is part of a year-long series of activities that also include mock interview sessions, resumé feedback, networking dinners, and a summer internship. “Whenever someone asks me what UPOP is, my best response is that it teaches us about the workplace and how to interact with others wherever we end up working,” said computer science major Julian Caballero, who participated in the program last year. During boot camp, each TA guides a group of about eight students through the multi-faceted aspects of engineering practice, including robust design, customer requirements, specifications, leadership, and presentation skills.
In a large conference room, surrounded by whiteboards and flip charts where students brainstormed, astronaut Janice Voss (PhD ’87), e-strategylabs, inc. CEO Ed Markowitz (SM ’71), and policy advisor/entrepreneur Mitch Tyson (SM ’78) shared their experiences as TAs last year. During their week on campus, they helped students develop tools to navigate careers that will likely take unexpected twists and turns, as the TA’s own careers did. They shared their work experiences with the students, providing real-life examples of both the breadth of the engineering field and the idea that, as Markowitz put it, “an MIT grad can do anything.” Why did these highly accomplished professionals take a week out of their busy schedules to mentor future engineers? For Voss, it was gratitude. “When I was a graduate student here, a talk given at MIT by astronaut alum Rusty Schweickart was enormously helpful to me. I quote his remarks about how to become an astronaut in talks that I give. I wanted to pay that back to current students at MIT – especially in the forum of emphasizing the importance of muddier real world issues like specifications, budgets, and resource allocation.” At the time of her high school graduation in 1972, Voss knew she wanted to be an astronaut. Twenty-one years later, she realized her dream. Between 1993 and 2000, she completed five flights on NASA space shuttles, logging over 49 days in space and traveling 18.8 million miles. Was Voss’s path from high school graduate to astronaut a straight, steady trajectory? Hardly. “It was chaotic. I was interested in lots of things, and I wanted to figure out what to do if I didn’t become an astronaut.” She pursued different fields, going from guidance and control to astrophysics to materials science, then back to guidance and control. Along the way, she attended MIT, earning a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics. After retiring from the astronaut corps, Voss assumed her current position as science director of the Kepler spacecraft, scheduled to launch in 2008. It was her background in astrophysics – one of the “backup plans” she explored should space travel have eluded her – that landed her the job. With an MIT education, Voss said, “I could step a little outside of my box. People do come out of MIT with the ability to flex.” As an engineering and management student at MIT, Markowitz developed process-analysis skills that became the basis of his career as a “Mr. Fix-It” for complex systems – whether those systems are military logistics chains or television productions. As head of e-strategylabs, inc., Markowitz helps clients ranging from the U.S. Air Force to the Florida Department of Children and Families to the producers of several TV shows, including CSI and its spinoffs, CSI: Miami and CSI: New York. His work with television includes optimizing production processes, from script to location to intellectual property issues, and reviewing scripts for technical accuracy. “I never outgrew my ADD (attention deficit disorder),” joked Markowitz, explaining his peripatetic career. “I don’t have formal credentials in 90 percent of what I do. MIT’s education in thought processes – thinking like an engineer – is what allowed me to do all this stuff.” He saw volunteering to help UPOP as a benefit to himself, as well as to the students. “By hanging out at MIT for a couple of weeks, I get reinspired by exposure to what I see and hear just wandering the halls and working with the program folks, the professors, and the Dean,” said Markowitz. “The big plus comes from my renewed sense of awe for our future which comes from spending a week with these young men and women – MIT students who will be guiding the future of progress in the world. That I get to help them become involved in learning the art of discovery and help them build the thought processes that will drive them to create, refine, define, and grow our future is a reward beyond compare.” Like Voss and Markowitz, Tyson found that his MIT training gave him the flexibility to shift gears professionally. “When I was a sophomore, if you told me I’d be in public policy, I’d have said, ‘No way.’ I was going to go into theoretical physics,” he remembered. It wasn’t long, however, before he discovered he liked working with people and taking classes outside the pure sciences. He ended up earning master’s degrees in both engineering and political science and then heading straight to Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s to work as the science advisor to the late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas. Among Tyson’s duties was exploring ways to help the U.S. compete better in the semiconductor industry. “I started to think that U.S. companies could do better,” he said. This planted the seed for an eventual career move to business. Forgoing management school for on-the-job training, Tyson worked his way up to CEO of PRI Automation, a post he held from 1998 to 2002. He led the company’s transformation from a small robot manufacturer to a leading supplier of semi-fab materials handling systems, with revenues of more than $300 million. Tyson thinks that the students in UPOP are more attuned to the need for adaptive behavior in the workplace than he and his classmates were 30 years ago. “They realize they need more than differential equations.” Still, the students found their instructors’ personal stories and workplace wisdom eye-opening. “Ed Markowitz was my TA. He not only impressed us with his technical background, but his diverse employment and interests really amazed me,” said Vivek Shah, an electrical engineering and management science major. “He gave us real-life examples of the people skills we learn in UPOP, explaining how he had to change his conversational and presentation style to accommodate everyone from four-star generals to Hollywood directors.” Tyson understands where Shah and his peers are coming from as they enter the workplace. “MIT students are smarter than the rest of the world,” he said. “We tell them, ‘You will find things [in the workplace] that don’t make sense to you. Dig under the surface, and these things will end up making more sense than you assumed at first.’” UPOP began in 2001 and currently involves over 250 MIT sophomores from every department in the School of Engineering, and some from other majors as well. For more information about UPOP, including opportunities for alumni involvement, contact the program’s director, Chris Resto (’99), at cresto@mit.edu. |
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