Electrical and Computer Engineering Newsblog

This past Tuesday Michigan Tech held its fall Career Fair, always a big event in the life of the university. Some 340 companies and organizations filled up the Student Development Complex, our recreational and athletic facility up the hill from the main part of campus. From 12 noon to 5 pm students lined up to talk to companies about opportunities for full-time positions, co-ops, and internships. The rain we had all day did not dampen anyone’s spirits, although it did encourage more students to drive, making parking around the SDC a complete madhouse. On Wednesday recruiters filled every available conference and meeting room on campus for follow-up one-on-one interviews. I am always energized to see the level of interest shown by recruiters toward our engineering students – it gives me the confidence that we must be doing something right.

As usual, the demand for electrical engineering and computer engineering students was very high. As of this writing I do not have the hard numbers on how many companies were seeking ECE graduates – those numbers are harder to track down than they were last year – but from walking the floor and talking to recruiters the situation does not appear to have changed from recent years. Something that was new, and good to see, was that recruiters seemed happier with the number and the quality of the ECE students they had a chance to talk to. Last year we had so many companies at Career Fair – 370, an all-time Michigan Tech record – that unfortunately some of those companies went home empty-handed and disappointed. On the one hand, it is very gratifying to see large numbers of companies beating down our doors for graduates, but on the other hand it may be healthier to have a certain equilibrium, where we have just enough demand to make our students optimistic about their careers but not complacent. A little anxiety is a good thing, to help our students step up their game in resume preparation and interview skills. I heard a lot of good things this year about the interactions on the Career Fair floor and in the follow-up interviews. As you might imagine I am proud of our students and happy for them as they prepare to enter the next chapter in their lives.

Also this week, on Thursday and Friday, the ECE Department is hosting the fall meeting of our External Advisory Committee, a group of 15 or so industry representatives who help us in our efforts at continuous improvement in everything we do. That meeting is still going on, so I won’t give a full report here.

It’s been a pretty busy week so by the time it is all over I am looking forward to taking the weekend off and spending some time with good friends at a cabin out on Lake Superior. The predicted weather is good, and who knows, we may even see some northern lights. Have a good one everybody!

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Greetings from the road! I am waking up this morning in the bustling metropolis of Miles City, Montana, conveniently located on I-94 about 700 miles east of Minneapolis, where I started yesterday morning, and 700 west of Spokane, where I will end up tonight. My wife and I are taking our youngest daughter off to college in Bellingham, Washington, on a long cross-country trip across the northern United States.

The personal story itself is not particularly noteworthy, but it does give me an opportunity to reflect on this important ritual in so many American lives, where Michigan Tech is front and center: leaving home and going to college. Every fall we and hundreds of other colleges see this writ large. In fact, this year in the ECE Department we are experiencing an 8% increase in undergraduate enrollment – the largest in the College of Engineering – as we welcome about 190 new first-year students to campus. It is good to have a chance to see this from the other side. It helps me to understand what an important responsibility we have in the life journey of these remarkable young adults we call our students.

Most of the more experienced faculty members in the ECE Department have been through this. We get what it means to give a gentle push and let go, as our children take their first steps as independent adults living away from home. This may explain, in part, why the older faculty tend to end up teaching the earlier courses in our curriculum. Pedagogy is very important to us at Michigan Tech, and it becomes more important as one goes earlier in the curriculum. The typical instructional career path in this and many departments starts with new faculty members teaching graduate courses, where the material is more important than the pedagogy, and as they gain experience teaching they work their way down the curriculum where the opposite is true. As a crusty old veteran I get a lot of satisfaction teaching a course in engineering mathematics for freshmen and sophomores.

Truth be told, we don’t have all that much contact with first-year students, my course being one exception. At Michigan Tech the first-year curriculum is the responsibility of a separate department called Engineering Fundamentals, and they do a fantastic job. All of the “traditional” departments in the College of Engineering are grateful and indebted to EF for their hard work and dedication.

Parents of course play a critical role in the hand-off. The relationship between the university and parents is somewhat curious. It would appear that our basic message to parents is: “Thank you for entrusting your children to our care and paying their tuition. Now go away.” Most of us, especially those of us with college-age children of our own, are actually perfectly happy to talk with parents and extol the virtues and benefits of a Michigan Tech education. At the same time, most of our parents understand the importance of backing away and letting their children take responsibility for their own lives. A lot of our parents are Michigan Tech alumni and can tell stories of the “good old days” when the disconnect was far more abrupt than it is today. Every so often I have to communicate with the so-called “helicopter parent”, but it is not an especially big issue and I don’t mind listening to their concerns. On rare occasions we have to invoke FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which prevents parents from access to everything they might want to know about the college life of their children. I imagine this comes up more often for our academic advisors, and in the Office of the Dean of Students, than it does for me.

A lot of American students today, for one reason or another, choose to attend schools close to home or even live at home. This runs counter to my own experience so it is hard for me to relate. Back in 1975 I knew I wanted to be at least a day’s drive away and so ended up choosing a school 400 miles away from Mom and Dad. All of my own children have ended up at schools about 2000 miles from home or more (not sure what that says…I’ll take that as a positive reflection of their desire for independence…) At Michigan Tech, by virtue of our location, almost all of our students travel quite a distance to Houghton. The population centers in downstate Michigan, home to the majority of Huskies, are some 500-600 miles away. I believe this has a big influence on the nature of our student body and the sense of community built in our little outpost in the Upper Peninsula.

The sun is rising on a beautiful day here in Montana. I am looking forward to a couple more days with my wife and daughter before I have to do the same thing that all of our other Michigan Tech parents do: say goodbye. Time to hit the road!

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

This weekend we observe the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, the day the United States was attacked by an international terrorist organization, both towers of the World Trade Center came down, the Pentagon was badly damaged, a 4th plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania, and thousands of Americans lost their lives in horrible fashion. It was a very dark day in our history, and I am certain that all of us who were around at the time can remember where they were and what they were doing. For me, I was driving my older son to school and was listening to the car radio as events unfolded. I will never forget a short while later when my younger son announced with (perhaps unintentional) sardonic wit, “Well, now I’ve got something for Current Events!” Classes were canceled at Washington University, and everyone sat around watching the follow-up afternoon news on big-screen televisions. To this day I think of September 10, 2001, a day of minor personal importance, as the last normal day in America.

In the years that followed people found various ways to the remember what had happened, something that I am certain will happen this year too. One of my favorites came from Norman Katz, a faculty member in the Department of Systems Science and Engineering at Washington University, who in his classes in engineering mathematics would read aloud this little-known 4th verse from “America the Beautiful”:

O Beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Things have never been the same since 9/11. Like it or not, we have given up liberties in the interest of increased security, the most obvious example for travelers being the hassles we have to go through in airports today. We are anxious about all manner of threats to our national security and to our personal security. Perhaps most insidious are threats to the well-being of people and organizations in the invisible world of cyberspace.

Our response to these 21st century threats must be both cautious and optimistic. We cannot be naive: we have to do what is prudent to protect ourselves and those that we love, along with our businesses, our schools, and our government. At the same time, we cannot live our lives in a climate of fear, otherwise the terrorists have won. I believe it is our duty as Americans to take all the right precautions – and our duty as engineers to help develop new technologies that enhance our security without being too intrusive – but in the end it is also our duty to live life with the openness and optimism that our way of life, defined and protected by the U.S. Constitution, affords us.

Life is an amazing adventure. 9/11 was a serious, tragic chapter in that story, but we cannot let it define who we are or what we stand for. I remain, as ever, grateful for the many joys and opportunities that have come my way. My sincere hope is that the majority of you feel the same way.

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Greetings and Happy September to all my friends following the ECE Department at Michigan Tech.

Here we go again – the beginning of a new academic year, a time I have always found to be energizing and exciting. While many of us, myself included, are sad to see the summer slip away (especially when we think about all the things we thought we were going to get done, and didn’t) September always brings with it the promise a new beginning. I have always thought that my teaching colleagues seemed quite a bit younger relative to other people at the same age, outside the academic world. It must have something to do with being around so many young people and the annual recharging our batteries that happens this time of year.

I know of no other line of work, except maybe in the church, where the rhythm is so closely tied to the annual trip of the earth around the sun as it is in academics. We kick things off in August or September, have breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas, start up again in January, take another to break sometime at the beginning of spring, then head down the home stretch to commencement in May. This is our liturgical calendar. As I head toward my 59th birthday next week, I look back and realize that, going all the way back to kindergarten, I have only had one year in my life – 1979 – when September did not mean the beginning of a new school year, either as a student or an educator. That one year came during a period between college and graduate school when I was working as young engineer at Telex Computer Products in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but now I am certain that it would feel odd not to be starting yet another school year in the fall.

Things are hopping here at Michigan Tech, and in the ECE Department. The latest figures show that we have 632 enrolled undergraduates, and about 250 graduate students. That’s a big jump in our undergraduate enrollment, and an 10-year high in total enrollment. I have to believe that this is due in part to the current demand for electrical and computer engineers, in terms of both job openings and starting salaries. Of course, we have to remember that these things can be cyclical, but right now is a pretty good time to be going into the field. I have written about this several times before, but it bears repeating: it is a lot of fun educating students to go into a field that so many employers actually care about. At Michigan Tech we like to think that we are doing things the right way to help prepare students to enter that workforce. We also recognize that there all sorts of good non-academic reasons that students like coming to Michigan Tech, 200 inches of snow notwithstanding – it’s a complete package.

Speaking of snow, the Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a heavier than normal year, and I hear people throwing around the figure of 300 inches. Some old-timers recall the winter of 1978-79, which was that kind of year, with a combination of delight and dread. If it happens, you will read about it in this column.

For those who need a little extra time to ease into the academic year gently, we always have the Labor Day weekend to get a school day off and mark the end of the summer. Enjoy it everyone!

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Just for fun, I thought I would write about music this week.

As most of my friends and acquaintances know, music has always been a big part of my life. I started classical piano lessons at age 6, learned about jazz in high school, and have been a semi-professional musician on the side all my adult life. I play keyboards in a variety of styles – jazz, popular, salsa, blues – and have a great time doing it. Oddly enough, I have found as many opportunities to play publicly in the tiny little communities of Houghton and Hancock as I have anywhere I have lived!

A lot of people I meet say something like, “wow, that’s so unusual, you can be both an engineer and a musician!” Actually, it’s not that unusual at all. I know a lot of engineers, especially electrical engineers, who have music as a hobby. On the back cover of the latest edition of the The Circuit, our alumni magazine, there is a photo taken at the annual Christmas party of seven ECE faculty members who are also musicians (plus one student, a drummer who was there at the time and who just graduated and took a job with Black & Veatch.) I think there is a natural connection between the two. Electrical engineers have a natural affinity for concepts like signals, systems, frequency, harmonic analysis, etc. and so we “get” a lot of the physics of sound and the organization of music. The craft of music is rather abstract, and a bit mathematical, and we engineers like that stuff. In academics, we are all performance artists in the classroom anyway, so getting over our stage fright and hamming it up come naturally.

It is reasonable to ask, did the engineering influence the music or was it the other way around? In my case, I did well in both piano lessons and in math as a young boy, and as I got into electrical engineering in college, I realized that a lot of concepts I was seeing in communication theory and related courses were a piece of cake, because of that musical training.  So I think in my case the music really did have an influence on the path I chose professionally, and it is no accident that I went into signal processing as my technical area of expertise. On the other hand, we have the example of Tim Schulz, our former chair and dean who, after coming back into the ECE Department as a regular faculty member, decided to take up guitar as the first musical experience of his life. He has taken to it like a fish to water, and is loving every minute. So, I suppose it goes both ways.

I am writing about this not just to toot my own horn (no pun intended), but rather to make a point about the importance of performing arts in K-12 education. I love art and music so I am perfectly happy with the notion of ars gratia artis, that is, arts education is valuable in and of itself. However, even if one were to push singlemindedly for STEM education because of its importance to our national economic development, I would still claim that arts education cannot be overlooked.  There is something about the training that goes along with learning music that enhances the mind and opens it up to math and science.  Students who practice their instruments 30 minutes or an hour a day learn the discipline they need to master other academic fields. By participating in band and orchestra they learn teamwork and cooperation, and in a beautiful way they also learn the value of diversity because of the way all the different instruments contribute to the whole. Perhaps most importantly, performing arts gives young people the opportunity to learn how to do something specific and concrete, and to demonstrate that they have mastered their skills in a public performance. The self-image and the confidence that goes along with that is invaluable. (The same argument can be applied to athletics, and I can see that too.) Engineering students don’t get a chance to do that until much later. So, I will always stand behind music and arts education as an important piece of STEM education.

Have a wonderful 4th of July weekend everyone! Get out there and support your local musicians!

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University