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An
Accidental Engineer
This is a slightly modified version of something I sent to a High School classmate who became a Test Engineer at Boeing. I guess I don't keep my toe in engineering anymore. I would think of myself as an accidental engineer and you as a very intentional one. Beyond getting stuff out of the house, so our kids don't get it from the older generation like we did, junk, and more junk, I'm working with visual art. Although where I'll put more, I don't know. I can't say that art was my first love, but I think it is the strongest. Except, of course, the family. I never was particularly interested in art classes in grade school or high school, but I have always been fascinated by the way the hand and mind can create an image from pigment on a surface and that image can be filled with meaning and emotion, at least sometimes. In high school, I really wasn't very interested and tried to get my homework done in study hall, so I could go home in peace. They kept pushing math and science courses and I kept taking them and enjoying them. The guidance counselor suggested Milwaukee School of Engineering, and we visited, and it seemed a good fit. I think the high school counselor thought engineering was easier than liberal arts. When I got to MSOE the program was standardized, not to mention rigorous. MSOE was on a tri-quarter system of 11 weeks, that fit 16 weeks of work into 11. In addition, the program was set up to typically require 19 credits per term. I signed up for Electrical Engineering and enjoyed learning math and science and engineering, but by the final term I was just plain worn out and tired of engineering and didn't do the final term. I paid for MSOE with Social Security and summer work at the Illinois Highway Department. My father died when I was just 16. I completely changed direction and applied to Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and put myself in the lottery for the draft. Don't ask me why, I couldn't tell you, maybe it was just the times. I sent them a portfolio, and they accepted me. Layton was a well-known and respected art school across the county with a beautiful old building situated on a bluff above Lake Michigan about six blocks from MSOE. When I reported for school in the fall it wasn't there, it was in an old grade school building. The beautiful building had been torn down for a freeway project that never happened. Layton was known for its heavy concentration on figure drawing. Figure drawing is to art like calculus is to engineering, it holds everything together and acts as a weeder course. You think you can draw until you are faced with the naked human body and are humiliated by it. I went to Layton for three years and Layton closed. The Board of Directors took their money and went home. They wanted to change the school, and the students didn’t want it changed, and even worse, the faculty felt underpaid and wanted a union. Layton was a great school and in the second year I picked Printmaking and Drawing as my area of concentration. Other schools came to Layton to sell their programs and Northern Illinois University was among them. NIU has a strong reputation for printmaking. The head of the Printmaking Department was the one who came, and he told me I didn't need a BFA to enter the graduate program since I already had a BSEE. He also said that since I was born in Illinois, I could get resident tuition. (The first summer after I started Layton, I talked to MSOE, and to my surprise, they transferred fine art courses as electives, and I took an engineering course to get my BSEE.) I applied to Northern and sent a portfolio. They accepted me as a Master of Fine Arts candidate. A Master of Fine Arts is a very peculiar degree requiring 60 semester hours in addition to a show or portfolio and a final exam. It focuses on coursework in a specific artistic field, such as visual arts, performing arts, creative writing, or design. Many MFAs are considered terminal degrees, meaning that it's the highest degree you can earn in that subject area. As such, the degree often qualifies you to teach at the university level. You can be thought of as Meister or Maestro. Your committee determines if you qualify to be a Master. In a sense it is not an academic degree, you don’t think about things, you have to be able to do them. I finished my MFA in 1976 with a concentration in Printmaking and Drawing after two and a half years. After all this educational silliness, I came out with a student loan of about half of the last semester's tuition. I met Lynette in 1971, and we were close friends for about a year and a half, then we weren't. In 1976, we became friends again and married in 1977. She had bought a duplex on Milwaukee's south side, and I spent about a year fixing it up, then it was time to find a job. There were a lot more jobs for engineers than Fine Arts Professors, so I became an engineer. I had never really wanted to sell art; I wanted to teach. Since companies were offering tuition reimbursement, I took it and ended up with a Master of Science in Engineering Management, a Master of Science in Engineering - Computer Specialty and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering - Microwave Communications. As soon as I got the MSEM, I quit being a manager, which I never regretted. Actually, the MSEE started as a PhD in Electrical Engineering. At fifty, I was foolish enough to think I could work full-time and do a part-time PhD. All the courses were calculus, complex numbers and various transforms. I mostly got A's in the courses, but then at 30 hours came the written final. At fifty something and working full-time, I just could not quite pass. So, I got an MSEE. This is how I accidentally became an engineer and enjoyed being one. It may seem a strange combination, but artists were engineers; Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Matthias Grünewald, to name a few. David C. Janssen
MS,
Electrical Engineering - Microwave Communications, University of
Wisconsin – Milwaukee, 2002 Awarded 21 U.S. Patents |