Professional Preface logo This story appears in The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society's student newsletter Professional Preface, vol. 2, no. 4, p. 2.

Find Out What Employers Need from You

Students attending the TMS Fall Meeting as part of Materials Week have the rare opportunity to hear what employers need straight from the horse's mouth through a symposium being offered by TMS at the meeting for the first time. All students are encouraged to attend the two-session symposium Materials Processing and Manufacturing--Educating for the Future on Tuesday, October 31.

Sponsored by the Materials Design & Manufacturing Division Council and the TMS Education Committee, the symposium will discuss employer needs in the education of future professionals through presentations by invited employer representatives.

Tuesday morning's session will open with an overview of current materials issues facing industry by Melvin Leitheiser, manager of the Ceramic Technology Center. James Watson, president of TwinStar Semiconductor, will discuss educational needs in the semiconductor industry, followed by a discussion on the national laboratories role in education by Robert J. Eagan, director of the Defense Programs Capabilities Center at Sandia National Laboratories. The final presentation, by George E. Dieter, director of Continuous Quality Improvement at the University of Maryland, will evaluate the professional master of engineering status.

The second session will begin Tuesday afternoon with "Educating for Tomorrow's Needs in the Metal Processing and Manufacturing Industries" by Edward H. Kottcamp, executive-in-residence at Lehigh University. Norman A. Gjostein, director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Ford Motor Company, will review the needs of the automotive industry. Presentations on the future of materials education will be given by J.C. Williams, general manager of General Electric Aircraft Engines, and Randall M. German, Brush Chair Professor of Materials at Pennsylvania State University.

Students, remind your faculty advisors to attend another education-related symposium at the meeting--Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory Experiments. This two-session symposium on Wednesday will describe laboratory exercises for undergraduate students in materials-related courses. Sponsored by the TMS Education Committee, the symposium will describe needed equipment, experimental procedures, data analysis, and reporting.

"Typically professors work in isolation," explained program organizer Mark Schlesinger. "This symposium will allow educators to share experiences and hopefully provide a collection of experiments that they may be able to use."

Educators and other interested meeting attendees are encouraged to drop in on Wednesday to view the experiments.

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