Today is the last day of winter break before classes start for the Michigan Tech “spring” semester, not counting the upcoming three-day holiday weekend. It still looks very much like winter outside, although we got a short-lived January thaw in the middle of this past week. A winter warm-up always reveals a lot of mud, muck, and other detritis, so despite the driving difficulties and public school closings, a fresh snowfall always brightens things up a bit. I thought this might be a good opportunity to mention a couple of other things that have brightened my day recently.
Our teaching evaluations for the Fall 2017 semester came back, and I was very pleased to see how well the department did in the eyes of our students. These evaluations are conducted online, before final exams, and consist of a series of survey questions with answers on a 1-to-5 scale. When we are boiling down the results, we typically look at one particular question that asks how strongly the student agrees with the statement “Taking everything into account, I consider this instructor to be an excellent teacher.” The department-wide average on this one question was 4.35, and the median was 5: 55% of the respondents indicated “Strongly Agree” with this statement. We also look closely at the average of 7 questions that deal with more the details on how the course is organized and taught – the so-called “Average of 7 Dimensions” – and on this one our average score across all respondents was 4.32. These results include courses taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty, our non-tenure-track faculty, and even the labs taught by our teaching assistants. It is the best we have done since the Fall 2014 semester, when we first started the online surveys and aggregated results were made available. Naturally I am very pleased to see this, and the timing couldn’t be better, as we are seeing an increase in our undergraduate enrollments in ECE. Of course, there may be other factors at play – the strong job market for EEs and CpEs might just be putting our students in a good mood when they fill out the surveys. I didn’t talk to a single ECE graduate at the December commencement who didn’t have a job lined up! Nevertheless, I will take what I can get, and congratulate the department faculty on a job well done.
Congratulations as well go to Assistant Professor Sumit Paudyal on the recent announcement of his National Science Foundation CAREER award. This is a 5-year grant that goes to early-career faculty in the U.S. that show exceptional scholarly promise. Prof. Paudyal’s project is titled “Operation of Distribution Grids in the Context of High-Penetration Distributed Energy Resources and Flexible Loads”, and in it he will bring state-of-the-art theoretical and computational tools in optimization (particularly mixed-integer second order cone programming, or MISOCP) and in robust and distributed control to the problem of managing the large and growing number of distributed energy resources and flexible loads in next-generation energy systems. Sumit was hired five years ago under a special Michigan Tech Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative (SFHI) in Next-Generation Energy Systems, and this has turned out to be an excellent hiring decision for Michigan Tech. About a year ago I wrote about all four of our assistant professors in the ECE Department, and with this turn of events I can now announce that all four have garnered prestigious early-career awards – three NSF CAREER awards and one Air Force Young Investigator awards. Nice going Sumit and all!
Finally, this week I was especially pleased to learn that Lisa Hitch, the ECE Business Manager and Technical Communication Specialist, was recognized for her service to Michigan Tech and the ECE Department with the “Making A Difference” award, in the category “Above and Beyond.” This is an annual award organized by the Michigan Tech Staff Council; there were 47 nominations and 7 award winners across 6 categories. Lisa and all the award winners were recognized in a special ceremony this past Wednesday, with the award presented by university president Glenn Mroz. Lisa really does go “above and beyond” for the ECE Department, in ways too numerous to mention but one in particular being to help me push this column out every week. The award is extremely well-deserved and so Lisa, thank you for everything you do!
First day of classes next Tuesday. Start your engines everyone!
– Dan
Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University