During Abram Winegardner Harris’s tenure as Northwestern’s 14th president in the early 1900s, he stressed the need for an engineering concentration, eventually persuading the University to create the College of Engineering in 1909 and build Swift Hall as its first home.
One century later, as the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science continues to flourish in an era of new innovation and design, Dean Julio Ottino continues to look at how to best prepare the school’s students for the future.
Since Harris’s time, the school has formed the nation’s first Department of Materials Science, hosted military training during World War II and built the Segal Design Institute to encourage cross-school collaboration. Originally, McCormick offered just two tracks: civil or mechanical-electrical engineering. Today, eight departments are available, including biomedical engineering and industrial engineering.
Steve Carr, dean of undergraduate engineering, has taught at NU for 40 years and said he has seen many changes, transitions and inventions.
“In some ways it’s still the exact same place,” he said. “Then in other ways, I continuously marvel at the difference between the way it was once upon a time and now.”
Having seen the development of new teaching technologies, Carr said he has learned how to adapt.
“I was regarded as adventurous because I used overhead projectors,” he said. “I saw a couple the other day and they had a thick layer of dust on them.”
McCormick faculty have often discussed how to better focus the curriculum on the students, Carr said.
“We’ve moved in the last 10 years to be heavy in measuring what students can do,” he said. “I’m proud that we’ve gotten to that point so it’s student-centered rather than faculty-centered.”
When Ottino became dean in 2005, he focused on collaborating with the other NU schools using a “whole-brain technique.”
“We are about balance here: a balance between left-brain skills that are necessary conditions in engineering,” Ottino said. “But here, we want the humanistic depth in arts and humanities.”
The school has expanded not only physically with additions to the Technological Institute, but also methodologically, with an increased focus on interdisciplinary learning.
“Students are not just taught by engineering professors but also by writing faculty members,” said Gina Myerson, McCormick’s director of marketing. “Subsequently, they get a much broader education, and they’re taught how to communicate well.”
Myerson said this type of learning differentiates the engineering school from those at other universities.
“About 10 years ago, the school adopted a new curriculum that involves students working with clients starting their very first year,” Myerson said of the Engineering Design and Communication class. “So they get engaged in finding solutions to real problems for real people, and in fact, that’s very unusual in engineering schools.”
Timothy Lawler, a McCormick sophomore, said that during his freshman year he helped design a vibration plate to prevent bone marrow density loss in paraplegics.
“For EDC there was a lot of science involved, but there’s also a creative aspect of designing and writing in the class,” Lawler said.
Ottino said NU’s outlook on McCormick students and classes has also changed.
“Tech was always perceived in the past as a place where there were very smart people,” he said. “In the last three years, given the problems that face us – global health, energy, sustainability – these people now feel like they are the ones who have the coolest problems in Northwestern.”
Michael Leaf, the chairman of the McCormick Student Advisory Board, said it’s exciting to be part of such an established institution at this time.
“I think (being an engineer) means to figure out what I can do to help the most people possible,” the McCormick junior said.
As the Centennial celebrates the past, Ottino said he wants to focus more on the future.
“We strive to position McCormick as…a place where technical skills are deep but are accompanied by creativity and humanistic depth; a place where faculty are preparing students to address the most challenging global problems,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Over the next eight months, Centennial events will take place all over the country, beginning Friday with the Centennial Campus Celebration.
The event will take place on Garrett Lawn beginning at 3:30 p.m., and will feature McCormick’s 22 student groups along with speeches from NU President Morton O. Schapiro and Ottino.
“It’s especially good how they’re involving students so much,” Leaf said. “It shows McCormick really understands it’s made up mostly of students and not of administrators.”
