Broadening the educational spectrum
Engineering faculty bring industry experiences to the classroom
Why would a highly-decorated Marquette professor take a job as an entry-level engineer?
Dr. Philip Voglewede — who has been awarded Marquette’s highest teaching excellence award — decided he wanted to get back in touch with the industry world of today. So he spent a year sabbatical getting reacquainted with the professional world outside the classroom, to help him back in the classroom.
This is just one example of how the Opus College of Engineering is emphasizing an entrepreneurial mindset and innovative teaching methods, tailoring Marquette engineering students’ education to the demands of today’s working world.
“We no longer have to train ‘obedient’ engineers,” says Dr. Kristina Ropella, Opus Dean of the Opus College of Engineering. “When I was in school, a lot of time was spent number crunching and working through equations. You still need to understand the theory, but those computations are all being done by computers today. So what do we need to do as engineers? I think we have to have a much higher-level systems approach, seeing how all the pieces fit together.”
Beyond that, Ropella wants to prepare engineers to work not only with an entrepreneurial mindset, but also with a Jesuit and Ignatian mindset — something she calls “Ignatian innovation.”
Next-generation manufacturing
As a senior project engineer at Rockwell Automation, Dr. Aderiano da Silva brings 22 years of invaluable industry experience into the classroom as an adjunct instructor of mechanical engineering. In a stroke of good fortune, he also found a way to bring in significant industrial hardware.
Da Silva already was developing a graduate-level industrial automation course for the college when he found out that Rockwell was looking for something to do with $300,000 worth of surplus equipment from a training program.
“It was a good coincidence!” Da Silva says.
He used the equipment to build six stations that students use to develop and test projects they design for his Industrial Automation and Controls course. In a recent class, students had to design a machine that makes cookies. In another one they created a machine that can fill, form and seal a bag of potato chips.
Da Silva, Grad ’06, ’15, also coaches students on how to build their resumes and teaches them the differences between writing a technical report for industry and writing one for class, which they practice while writing their reports for each project.
“It opens their eyes to things that they were not aware of,” Da Silva says.
This class has students apply academic knowledge to practice by bringing the latest technology, methods and design techniques used in the industry today into the classroom. “It helps them build a better relationship between what they learn in their other classes and what’s used in industry,” he says.
Students’ real-world manufacturing experience is about to become even more robust. On the first floor of Haggerty Hall, Dr. Joseph Schimmels, Eng ’81, Robert C. Greenheck Chair in Design and Manufacturing and professor of mechanical engineering, is overseeing the construction of a Flexible Assembly Systems Network (FASN) Advanced Manufacturing Center. Once complete, it will give students the chance to work with a set of machines that can adapt to assemble different kinds of products — a significant area of growth in industry.
“In order to teach them how to use hardware, you have to have the hardware,” Schimmels says. “We will have the hardware now. Students working on projects will get a very immersive, hands-on experience.”
The center will expose students to next-generation manufacturing, and it will allow Marquette to build industry partnerships and take on projects that it didn’t have the capacity to tackle in the past.
“This is something that’s in demand,” Schimmels says. “When I mentioned to people in industry that we were developing this, they said they would like to become members — not necessarily because they have projects they want us to run, but just to get access to students who are being trained in this area.”
Good, clean fun
Making modern microelectronic and micromechanical devices requires an environment that’s almost completely free of potentially contaminating particles.
In the basement of Engineering Hall, construction is underway for a Class 1,000 clean room — meaning that, once operational, there will be no more than 1,000 particles that are half a micron in diameter per cubic foot of space. (Your garage might have 100,000 such particles per cubic foot, and a classroom has about 10,000.)
“The reason why we make our devices in the clean room is that a really small particle, even one of those in the wrong spot, can destroy a device,” says Dr. Ron Coutu, Jr., professor of electrical and computer engineering and the V. Clayton Lafferty Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering. “A human hair is about 100 microns in diameter. And we’re talking about particles that are 0.5 microns — so really tiny. If you have too many of those guys on a device in the wrong spot, it can destroy it.”
Students will be able to work on micromechanical and microelectronic devices such as a transistor or resistor in the clean room, and researchers will be able to work with more advanced topics such as thin film material properties.
“I’m hoping to add a lab component where the students get suited up and actually make a device that we’re learning about in class,” Coutu says.
Who’s the new guy?
When Dr. Philip Voglewede decided to trade his Engineering Hall office for a cubicle at Eaton Corp. to work as an entry-level engineer for a year, he wanted his experience to be as authentic as possible — even if the person in the cube next to him was one of his former graduate students. When they needed someone to run basic device testing, he was there at 5:30 a.m. to do it.
Why make a temporary return to this world? Voglewede had previous industry experience at Whirlpool Corporation, but that was in the 1990s.
“All my examples had this staleness to them,” Voglewede says. “I’m like, ‘yeah, when I was working back in the mid-1990s,’ and you look at your students and they were born in the ’90s. I’ve got to come up with better stories. And now I can do that.”
Back on the job, the associate professor of mechanical engineering was struck by the availability of technology; computer-aided drafting and dynamic simulation programs, once rare, now are on everyone’s desktop.
“I’ve got to have my undergrads ready to be able to do computational analysis straight out of school,” Voglewede says. “They have to analyze systems at a much higher level.”
Where innovation meets St. Ignatius
So if engineering students don’t need to spend quite as much time crunching numbers as they used to, what should they do instead?
Ropella believes the college’s focus on teaching theory in the context of industry application will help students in the job market. She also wants to increase collaboration with industry partners, academic institutions and other academic units at Marquette.
“Our best work will be done when we’re teaming with others,” Ropella says. “Our engineers are continually reflecting on the impact of their work on humanity as a whole. Our engineers should be doing that, given who we are as Marquette University.”
