April 4, 2001: Features

High-tech education for a high-tech world

Engineering school dean James Wei reflects on 10 years of change

by Kathryn Federici Greenwood

As its dean for a decade, James Wei has led the School of Engineering and Applied Science through its evolution - adjusting curriculum and research to fit the world's emerging needs. He has overseen a host of changes, among them the spawning of inventions and new technologies, the increase in the number of women on the faculty, the construction of the Friend Center for Engineering Education due to open next fall, and the development of new courses and research programs in conjunction with other science and humanities departments.

Each year about one-fifth of Princeton's undergraduates major in one of the six engineering departments. Although there are no typical engineering students, they routinely achieve high marks. In the last 10 years, four engineering students were named university valedictorians. In any year, some 50 percent of academic achievement awards given out at Opening Exercises in September go to SEAS students. Considered one of the top programs in the nation and the best among the Ivies, the school's prime mission is to produce students who are comfortable both with technology and the liberal arts.

With just a little over a year to go before his appointment as dean expires in June 2002, Wei, who came to the U.S. in 1949 from China and earned his doctorate in chemical engineering from M.I.T., talked with PAW about the accomplishments and goals of the school.

Why do undergraduates decide to study engineering, and what do they end up doing in their careers?

There's a whole variety of reasons why they come here for engineering. The career pattern in the past used to be manufacturing - making useful things like light bulbs or cars. But increasingly our economy is changing to a service economy. More and more students end up in investment banking, brokerage firms, consulting, and so forth.

Roughly one-fourth of our students start and stay in engineering jobs. The other three-quarters do other things or go to graduate school, either medical, business, law, or a Ph.D. program. Engineering becomes part of the background that teaches them quantitative skills, organization, ways with technology, and so forth.

Do you wish more alumni stayed in engineering?

Our job is not to tell them where they should go. Our job is to prepare them so that they can find their own place in the world. Whatever it is, if they are successful and happy, we are happy. We don't take the position they should all be making cars or light bulbs. There's more to life than that.

I've heard that engineering graduates joke that a Princeton degree doesn't prepare you to actually do engineering.

It's usually true. I've been talking to a number of my graduates who are executives in manufacturing. They said, "If we were to hire a Texas A&M graduate, and put him in this oil field in Texas, he would immediately know which valve to turn and how to get more oil out of the ground. But if I hire one of your graduates, it will take a year or two before they are up to that speed." I said, "You don't like our graduates?" And they said, "Oh, no, no. Quite the opposite. Inside three to five years, your graduate would outperform the Texas A&M graduate because your students know more about people, about economics, about politics. They would just excel. They're just not geared to narrowly focused engineering jobs." I was very glad to hear that.

Our students don't all go work in an oil field. Some work for pharmaceutical companies or cosmetics. And each company has its own special needs. It is not our intention to teach them how to hit the ground running in all these industries. And this is not the purpose of education anyway. That's the kind of thing industry should teach them. Our kids are not educated to know which valve to turn.

How are Princeton engineering students different from those at institutions like M.I.T., Caltech, and Stanford?

The ones that go to M.I.T. are probably planning to become engineers for a long time and dedicate themselves to studying and learning math, physics, chemistry, and so forth. We tend to get students who are just as good in these areas but they spend a lot more time on liberal arts and working in team student organizations, taking leadership positions.

Before I came to Princeton, I was a department head at M.I.T. for 14 years. There used to be a saying at M.I.T: M.I.T. is good at producing chief engineers, but somehow they very often end up working for CEOs who are Princeton graduates.

Every year or so I stage the Gordon Wu lectureship. We have had many outstanding leaders give these lectures, such as [former CEO of Lockheed Martin] Norman Augustine '57 *59, Phil Condit *65 of Boeing, and most recently we had Jeff Bezos '86 of Amazon.com. And when people ask them what they attribute their success to, they always mention that they had a rigorous education in science and engineering at Princeton, but they also got great exposure to the liberal arts, which helps to broaden their understanding; they know more about people and organizations than engineers from other places.

Why do you think that a lot of Princeton's academic awards go to engineering students?

The engineering students take studying at Princeton more seriously. They are better organized and more disciplined. They spend more hours studying than most other students. We usually split the top academic prizes with the real ferocious departments like math, physics, and astrophysics.

The engineering school is developing courses that are attractive to liberal arts students, such as former Harvard Business School professor, congressman, and entrepreneur Ed Zschau '61's course High-tech Entrepreneurship. Why is it important for a history major, for example, to know something about engineering?

Because technology is making such rapid strides and controlling so much in the world, our liberal arts students should know something about engineering and technology before they graduate. Right now, something on the order of 30 to 40 percent of liberal arts graduates take one or more courses in the engineering school. I don't think that's enough.

We need to find courses that the liberal arts students will find useful to their own careers and to their own understanding.

How has the curriculum changed for engineering students?

Our students used to be taught that they were supposed to make useful things that people want. So there were only two parties involved - the buyer and the seller. Gradually it became more evident than ever that there's a third party involved - it includes the public and biodiversity, the water, the air. We have to teach our students how to deal with the environment and what is involved. And how to be responsible for these changes.

What is the research strategy you see for Princeton's future?

Our research strategy is controlled by a few factors that we have to mention first. People usually associate M.I.T., Stanford, and Berkeley with having the best engineering programs. All three of them are three to four times bigger than Princeton engineering. We have about a hundred professors, and they have 300 to 400 professors. So we compete with them by trying to do a few things exceptionally well, because we cannot do everything. If they have 10 programs, we cannot have 10 programs. We could have two or three. We pick and choose to see which are the areas that we have an advantage in. We find departments in the sciences and in humanities that can back us up.

And there are some research areas in which we are the strongest in the world because we picked them well and put a lot of faculty there. We are very good in computer theory, and we're very good at multimedia, meaning combining computers with sound and pictures. In electrical engineering we are good at POEM [the Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials].

Princeton's one-year, no-thesis master of engineering degree sounds very un-Princeton. Has it been hard to promote?

Not really. Princeton is such an old school with a great tradition. Usually what you want to do is persuade everybody that this is not a new idea, but an old idea, and everybody would feel better. We always had a master's degree, it's just that we didn't put much emphasis on it until recently.

The master's is not a research degree, but neither do we want all our Princeton alumni doing research and teaching. Our purpose is to prepare them for leadership positions, whichever way they go.

Most of the master's degrees in the past were based on doing a thesis, which tends to take an indefinite length of time. So a lot of people don't want to do a thesis because they fear that they would be out of circulation for too long. But if you have an assurance that you can earn a master's in one year, a lot more people are willing to take the plunge. At Stanford there are as many as 900 master's degrees a year in engineering. Mainly these are people who work in Silicon Valley, and they never show up on campus. They go to their company cafeterias in the evenings and turn on the TV and hear the lecture. It is a big money-making proposition. But we're not going to do that.

What's the advantage, then, to offering the one-year program?

In the words of one of my faculty members, "This is to help Princeton cast a longer shadow." We need to help the people who have companies around us. New Jersey is quite an innovation state with all the pharmaceuticals, electronics, and so forth. More companies would be willing to locate here and hire a lot of engineers if they could have a chance to come to Princeton and get a master's degree. Many of the engineers would like to get more education; we should provide that.

I understand that close to three-fourths of Princeton's patents are generated by faculty members associated with the engineering school. Has collaboration with industry been a new development for the SEAS?

We used to pay no attention to patents and inventions. In the last 10 years, we've come a long way. We're beginning to do a lot more patenting and doing a lot more spawning out new companies. Ten years ago there was almost nothing. But now with POEM, and Ed Zschau, the professors are more and more conscious of the idea of starting new companies. Engineering shouldn't be all theory but also deliver something that will make people's lives better.

As far as national averages go, Princeton is above the curve on the percentage of women on the SEAS faculty - one-tenth - and the number of female undergraduates - one-third of SEAS students (twice the national average). Has there been an effort to recruit women to the faculty and attract more female students?

Indeed. When I first came we had two women on the faculty. We've come a long way. Though I would like to see those numbers grow. But we also have other targets, too. We have one black faculty member out of a hundred. We need more. We have an offer out to a second black professor, and we hope he will come.

Have you tried to encourage black undergraduates, who comprise just 9 percent of the engineering program, to pursue careers in academia?

I have a lot of black undergraduates here and I ask them, "Are you going on to graduate school?" They say, "Oh no. I want to make money." I tell them, "Somebody has to go to graduate school." "Not me," they say. "We don't care about your statistics, we want our own career." Bless them. They have their own goals in mind.

How many hours a week do you spend at work?

The dean of engineering job involves general oversight, so there is a great deal of discretion on what is most worthwhile to work on. I also teach and do research on a regular basis. So I do what I can, and then I go to paint and play the piano.

Kathryn Federici Greenwood is PAW's staff writer.