OR/MS CAREERS IN ENGINEERING SCHOOLS

Reha Uzsoy 
School of Industrial Engineering 
Purdue University 
West Lafayette, IN 47907

INFORMS Doctoral Colloquium 
New Orleans, LA 
October 28, 1995 

OVERVIEW 

  • It's not your father's OR/MS - nor his university neither!
  • Differences between engineering and business schools
  • Doing OR/MS in the engineering environment
  • How to be a good OR/MS faculty member
  • Summary and discussion

YOUR FATHER'S OR/MS IN YOUR FATHER'S UNIVERSITY 

  • Healthy national and state economies
  • Large influxes of funding into universities
  • Plentiful federal research funds
  • Considerable industrial interest in OR/MS
  • Almost exclusive emphasis on research, leaning towards more theoretical area
      •  
    • Very little emphasis on teaching
  • LOTS of job opportunities

YOUR OR/MS IN YOUR UNIVERSITY 

  • Significant economic recession in several key industries
  • State budgets for education flat or declining
    • Fewer faculty positions
  • High output of Ph.D.'s over the last several years
  • Major declines in federal research funding
  • University systems coming / will come under increased outside scrutiny

ENGINEERING SCHOOLS IN TRANSITION 

  • Pendulum is swinging towards undergraduate teaching as an important criterion for promotion and tenure
  • Publish and/or perish is still very much alive
  • Demands on junior faculty increasing steadily
    • Tightened funding
    • More emphasis on teaching 
    • Upward sticky promotion criteria
  • Instead of being good at just one thing, we have to be good at everything!

ENGINEERING SCHOOLS VS. BUSINESS SCHOOLS 

  • Different type of teaching to different type of students
  • More emphasis on funding than in business schools
    • More time spent on developing proposals, industrial relationships
  • Need to work on research projects with deliverables to sponsors
    • Heavy interaction with graduate students
  • Large pool of highly qualified MS and Ph.D. students available
    • Research with MS students through theses, projects

    OR/MS IN ENGINEERING SCHOOLS 

  • Resident in many different departments
    • Industrial engineering
    • Electrical engineering - communications, AI
    • Civil engineering - transportation
    • Chemical engineering - batch process design and scheduling
  •  Often no clear perception of OR/MS as an independent discipline
    • Distinction from quantitative methods as in business schools
    • Distinction from mathematics and statistics
    • Something we do all the time

    DOING OR/MS IN AN ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT 

  • Important to have an application base
  • Interact with other departments to identify novel problems and applications
    • Scheduling of multimedia data transmission
    • Environmental issues
  • Need to be able to fund your research program
    • Federal funding for "pure" research hard to get
    • Need industrial buy-in even for theoretical research
  • Need to educate other disciplines on nature, contribution of OR/MS
    •

    BEING A GOOD OR/MS FACULTY MEMBER 

  • Research
  • Teaching
  • Involvement with students
  • Involvement with the community at large
    •

    RESEARCH 

  • Interact with other engineering disciplines
    • Interdisciplinary research
    • Novel application areas
    • Increase awareness of OR/MS
  • Develop an application base
    • Should be able to relate your research to applications fairly directly
  • Explore new, interesting problems as well as work on existing areas
    • Service industries are a relatively unexplored area
    • Keep P&T requirements in mind

    TEACHING 

  • It is not hard to be a competent teacher
    • Be organized
    • Be fair
    • Do your homework
    • Be accessible (within limits)
  • Challenge and involve students
    • Open-ended projects, case studies
    • Research projects with undergraduates
  • Students are probably our most valuable product
    •

    INVOLVEMENT WITH STUDENTS 

  • You are a role model from the moment you step onto campus
  • Teach professional integrity and standards
  • Teach how to do research - how to address ill-structured problems
  • Teach basic survival skills
    • How to teach
    • How to publish, write proposals

    INVOLVEMENT WITH THE COMMUNITY AT LARGE

  • Contribute to other people's students
    • Thesis committees., assistance in your area of expertise
  • Get involved with professional societies and conferences
    • Networking, recognition
  • Get involved in the refereeing process
    • Chance to read the most current work in your field
    • Give constructive criticism to fellow researchers
    • Recognition by editors, your peers

    SUMMARY 

    • Universities and engineering schools are in a transition
    • Teaching and industrial contacts becoming more important
    • Interesting, novel OR/MS applications exist in different engineering disciplines
    • Need to be open to new areas and approaches
      • Hammer looking for nail?
    • Need to educate other disciplines on who we are, what we do