Generalists in a specialized world

摘要

During quarantine, a book club was launched to overcome isolation by connecting with alumni in the Department of Systems & Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona. This gave alumni and the advisory board the opportunity to read a book and discuss over Zoom every few weeks. We divided a book into four subsections to "chunk" the topics into manageable pieces and give our Zoom discussions focus. For the inaugural book, we read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. I was familiar with Epstein's previous book, The Sports Gene, and liked his storytelling style. More importantly, I felt that a book like Range would appeal to alumni with an industrial engineering background since our profession's skillset has a broad range of application areas.