Engineering and Business: Perfect Partners
April 22nd, 2009Our engineering students continue to be forward-thinking and business-oriented! A group of College of Engineering students have partnered with students from the Fisher College of Business to create the Ohio State Society of Business Engineers,whose primary objective is to increase the business perspective, professionalism and leadership of its members through activities and experiences outside the traditional academic environment.
SoBE hosted its first event on April 20. The group invited Christine Poon, Dean of the Fisher College of Business, and me to speak about the “Guidelines to Technical Leadership” and “Taking Risks to Achieve Success.” I enjoyed this great opportunity to meet the current members of SoBE and learn more about the group. I encourage all engineering students to consider joining SoBE and getting involved in the business of engineering!
July 13th, 2009 at 7:29 am
I am on the faculty of the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering, and have a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering. A desire to better link my research and teaching to what industry values in their college recruits, I started carefully studying the technical subject matter that is underlying buzzword strategies like Lean, Theory Of Constraints, Six Sigma, etc. Now, about a decade later, I firmly believe that the best way for a department like ours to forge ties with industry, we must closely link all of our co-curricular activities in some way or the other to local and Ohio industry. I have done this, and have the mechanisms and pathways for engagement fully mapped. A distinguishing feature of our engagement with industry should be leveraging the research we do and the new methods and tools that we bring to the table. If we do that, we would go ten times better than the buzzwords that grab people’s attention, instead of the profession of Industrial Engineering. Would the college support one such idea — a faculty-mentored internship program, LEAP (Learn, Earn, Apply, Practice), to deploy computer-aided methods for design and operation of small manufacturing enterprises?