Thursday, April 16, 2009

A bumper crop of Professors

I recently renewed a contact with a guy who used to be in the same research group as me. He is now a professor at a pretty prestigious school. I started looking at other former memebers of the research group and found that 4 other contemporaries of mine are also professors. There may well be others that I've lost track of as they've returned overseas.

Now consider these facts: 1) the number of professorships in engineering is not increasing at any great clip 2) a professor needs over the coarse of his/her entire career to only have one student become a professor as to ensure that the field doesn't shrink. It would then seem that my advisor turning out 5 professors within 5 years is, if not a record, pretty impressive. Can anybody top that?

2 comments:

El Joaco said...

Without necessarily revealing your "true identity", may you tell us the name of this advisor.
Thanks

John said...

No problem. (Afterall, I little bit of tedious detective work would lead you to this...)

My advisor was A.J. McHugh. He was at Illinois (Urbana) but now is at Lehigh. The profs are
1) W. Burghardt (Northwestern)
2) M. E. Mackey (Michigan State)
3) A. Tree (Oklahoma State)
4) B. Khomami (Tennessee), and
5) B. Edwards (Tennessee)

(All in the chemical engineering departments.)