MECHANICS OF A CAREER, THE

ASEE Prism, Mar 2005 by Grose, Thomas K

What makes someone decide to become an engineer? Six highly accomplished educators tell their stories.

HERE'S A GIVEN: All engineers were strong math and science students while growing up. Clearly, those talents provided them with an entree to the world of engineering. But a facility with math and science offers a wide variety of career paths. At what point in their childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood did today's engineers decide that engineering was for them? Was there some signal event? A Eureka! moment? Or was it a process, a series of fortunate events? Are they the sons and daughters of engineers carrying on a family tradition? Perhaps some astute grade-school teacher pointed them in the right direction. Or maybe they were garage tinkerers who just stumbled into it?

Wanting to find out, Prism spoke to six engineering academics and asked them for their stories, what led them to eventually don lab coats pick up a slide rule, and become distinguished engineering researchers and teachers. We expected to hear some interesting stories well worth sharing with Prism readers. We weren't disappointed.

1 WALLACE T. FOWLER

AS A CHILD growing up in Greenville, Texas, Wallace T. Fowler was besotted with airplanes. He kept a box of 3x5 cards detailing the specs of every plane made, and when B36s flew over his grandmother's house, he could tell which engine they had, just by the sound of their drone. So clearly, ending up as a top aerospace engineering professor was a foregone conclusion. Right?

Not really. What Fowler, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas-Austin (UT), wanted to be was a test pilot. Poor eyesight and childhood asthma dashed those hopes. And his decision to go into engineering initially resulted from the need to better communicate with two graduate engineering students he was working for.

After graduating from high school in 1956, Fowler first went to college at Rice University as a physics major. A year later, he transferred to Texas for financial reasons and changed his major to mathematics. In his junior year, Fowler began learning computer programming, and as a senior, he was hired to do some programming for a couple of mechanical engineering graduate students. But there was a communications breakdown: "I did not understand the engineering and they did not understand the numerical analysis." To improve matters, Fowler began taking engineering mechanics courses -and discovered he liked them. When he got to graduate school. Fowler switched from math to engineering mechanics. "I was a hooked," he says.

Not long after earning his master's, Fowler began working on his first space-related project, which involved guidance systems for vehicles flying Earth-to-Mars, low-thrust trajectories. After completing his Ph.D. in 1965, he joined the budding space engineering program at UT. And in 1976, when he became a full professor, Fowler spent a semester working at the United States Air Force Test Pilot School -a thrilling sojourn for someone who dreamed as a kid of being a test pilot.

During the 1981-82 academic year he also taught at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. There Fowler's career was once again transformed. He was asked to teach a design course, something he had never done before. It turned out to be a great fit. "I thought, Oh my gosh, this is what it's all about,' " Fowler recalls. "I had never taught design,, but found that I loved the challenges of working with teams of students developing new concepts and systems to meet specified needs."' Back at UT, he developed a spacecraft/space systems design course that he's been teaching ever since. His most recent class had 57 students divided into nine teams working on such projects as a Mars Rover, an interplanetary navigation system, and a system to extract water from Martian soil.

Although he is "now on the space side of the house," the 66-year-old Fowler admits it still surprises him that he's been able to carve a career out of his boyhood fascination with airplane flight.

2 LINDA P.B. KATEHI

ON JULY 20,1969, Linda P.B. Katehi decided to become an electrical engineer. There's a good reason why Katehi, 55, can pinpoint when she decided her career path with such accuracy: on that day, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. Katehi was a middle school student living in a small rural community on the Greek island of Salamis, a large pine-covered tract of land in the Aegean Sea that was home to the mythic hero Ajax and the playwright Euripides. Her father was a musician, her mother a homemaker. Luxuries were scarce. They didn't have a television, so Katehi watched the NASA broadcast of the historic moon walk at a neighbor's.

"For my generation, the moon landing had a major technological and social impact," she says. It certainly affected her. But as fascinated as Katehi "was by Armstrong's lunar stroll, she was even more gripped by the shots of Houston's, mission control, with its banks of blinking lights and flickering screens. "That's what impressed me most, and that's when I decided not to be an astronaut, but an electrical engineer." Twelve is an impressionable age for kids, espedaily girls, Katehi says. "That's when [girls] more or less make up their minds about what they like or don't like and what they want to do." Which, she adds, is a good reason for members of the engineering profession to reach out to girls at an early age. Katehi was the first in her family to go to college and the first girl from her community to attend a technical school. She was helped by her math teacher, Mr. Balbouzis. He found her advanced math books, then in short supply on Salamis, and encouraged her to seek a career that utilized her math skills.