Engineering Management - Where It Was, Where it Is Now, Where It Is Going

摘要

My interest in Engineering Management goes back to late 1960s. Armed with a Masters degree in Structural Engineering from Lehigh University, I was working as an engineer at United Engineers in Philadelphia. I loved my work but became increasingly uncomfortable with the realization that the better I became as an engineer, the more I was getting involved in detailed analysis of systems for which the key decisions had already been made by others. Worse yet, it became painfully obvious that I was prepared to do excellent design, but nowhere in my education had I been prepared to tackle the strategic issues, the people issues, the organizational issues or the financial issues that actually determined whether or not my design was relevant. Searching for educational options to fill the gap that was bothering me, I eliminated the business schools because they appeared to be too soft and too far removed from engineering. I revered my engineering identity and wanted to build unto it rather than shifting to a business degree. Operations Research was an appealing field but I was not interested in becoming strictly a mathematical model builder, either. Finally, I stumbled into something that, I felt, was tailor made for me. University of Pittsburgh had a program in Operations Research and Systems Management in the Industrial Engineering Department. It was exactly what I was looking for. I quit what was a well paying job at the time, and became a student again in 1971.