School of Engineering
MIT Alums Teach UPOP Students Professional Skills
UPOP TA Ed Markowitz '70, SM '71 (left) with students Jorge Renjifo '07 (middle) and Vivek Shah '07. Photo: Jason Atkins.
An astronaut, an enterprise business architect who works in entertainment, and a former Senate science advisor—all MIT alumni—recently returned to campus to share in an influential mission. They came to offer undergraduates a valuable glimpse of engineering practice in the real world. In the process, they got their own glimpse future engineering leaders.
Each January, about two dozen alumni volunteer as teaching assistants at week-long, corporate-style training seminars for MIT sophomores enrolled in the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP). A mentoring and internship program, UPOP helps hundreds of students develop engineering, business, and interpersonal skills that will give them a leg up when they begin their careers. Nicknamed boot camp, each seminar is part of a year-long series of activities that also include mock interview sessions, resumé feedback, networking dinners, and a summer internship.
"Whenever someone asks me what UPOP is, my best response is that it teaches us about the workplace and how to interact with others wherever we end up working," says computer science major Julian Caballero '07, who participated in the program last year.
During boot camp, each TA guides a group of about eight students through the multi-faceted aspects of engineering practice, including robust design, customer requirements, specifications, leadership, and presentation skills.
Astronaut Janice Voss SM '77, PhD '87, e-strategylabs, inc. CEO Ed Markowitz '70, SM '71 and policy advisor/entrepreneur Mitch Tyson '75, SM '78 signed on as TAs last year. They wanted to help students develop tools to navigate careers that will likely take unexpected twists and turns, as the TA's own careers did. They shared their work experiences with the students, providing real-life examples of both the breadth of the engineering field and the idea that, as Markowitz puts it, "an MIT grad can do anything."
Why did these highly accomplished professionals take a week out of their busy schedules to mentor future engineers?
For Voss, it was gratitude. "When I was a graduate student here, a talk given at MIT by astronaut alum Rusty Schweickart '56, SM '63 was enormously helpful to me. I quote his remarks about how to become an astronaut in talks that I give. I wanted to pay that back to current students at MIT—especially in the forum of emphasizing the importance of muddier real-world issues like specifications, budgets, and resource allocation."
Was Voss's path from high school graduate to astronaut a straight, steady trajectory? Hardly. "It was chaotic. I was interested in lots of things, and I wanted to figure out what to do if I didn't become an astronaut." She pursued different fields, going from guidance and control to astrophysics to materials science, then back to guidance and control. At MIT, she earned a master's in electrical engineering and computer science and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics.
Between 1993 and 2000, she completed five flights on NASA space shuttles, logging over 49 days in space and traveling 18.8 million miles. After retiring from the astronaut corps, Voss assumed her current position as science director of the Kepler spacecraft, scheduled to launch in 2008. Her background in astrophysics—one of the backup plans she explored should space travel have eluded her—landed her the job. With an MIT education, Voss says, "I could step a little outside of my box. People do come out of MIT with the ability to flex."
As an engineering and management student at MIT, Markowitz developed process-analysis skills that became the basis of his career as a Mr. Fix-It for complex systems—whether those systems are military logistics chains or television productions. As head of e-strategylabs, inc., Markowitz helps clients ranging from the U.S. Air Force to the Florida Department of Children and Families to the producers of several TV shows, including CSI and its spinoffs, CSI: Miami and CSI: New York. His work with television includes optimizing production processes, from script to location to intellectual property issues, and reviewing scripts for technical accuracy.
"I never outgrew my ADD (attention deficit disorder)," jokes Markowitz, explaining his peripatetic career. "I don't have formal credentials in 90 percent of what I do. MIT's education in thought processes—thinking like an engineer—is what allowed me to do all this stuff."
He saw volunteering to help UPOP as a benefit to himself, as well as to the students. "By hanging out at MIT for a couple of weeks, I get reinspired by exposure to what I see and hear just wandering the halls and working with the program folks, the professors, and the Dean," says Markowitz.
"The big plus comes from my renewed sense of awe for our future which comes from spending a week with these young men and women—MIT students who will be guiding the future of progress in the world. That I get to help them become involved in learning the art of discovery and help them build the thought processes that will drive them to create, refine, define, and grow our future is a reward beyond compare."
Like Voss and Markowitz, Tyson found that his MIT training gave him the flexibility to shift gears professionally. "When I was a sophomore, if you told me I'd be in public policy, I'd have said, 'No way.' I was going to go into theoretical physics," he remembers.
It wasn't long, however, before he discovered he liked working with people and taking classes outside the pure sciences. He ended up earning master's degrees in both engineering and political science and then heading straight to Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s to work as the science advisor to the late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas.
Among Tyson's duties was exploring ways to help the U.S. compete better in the semiconductor industry. "I started to think that U.S. companies could do better," he says. This planted the seed for an eventual career move to business. Forgoing management school for on-the-job training, Tyson worked his way up to CEO of PRI Automation, a post he held from 1998 to 2002. He led the company's transformation from a small robot manufacturer to a leading supplier of semi-fab materials handling systems, with revenues of more than $300 million.
Tyson thinks that the students in UPOP are more attuned to the need for adaptive behavior in the workplace than he and his classmates were 30 years ago. "They realize they need more than differential equations."
Still, the students find their instructors' personal stories and workplace wisdom eye-opening.
"Ed Markowitz was my TA. He not only impressed us with his technical background, but his diverse employment and interests really amazed me," said Vivek Shah '07, an electrical engineering and management science major. "He gave us real-life examples of the people skills we learn in UPOP, explaining how he had to change his conversational and presentation style to accommodate everyone from four-star generals to Hollywood directors."
By Lauren Clark, School of Engineering
Published March 21, 2006
