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Students advised to be ‘ready for takeoff,’
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“Be ready for takeoff. If you choose to be optimistic and take action toward the right goals, you will win.”
Few engineering schools have anything like UB’s Engineering Career Institute (ECI), which teaches engineering students about job-hunting and important, professional success skills.
That’s why Dean Millar, ECI director at UB, wrote “Ready for Takeoff! A Winning Process for Launching Your Engineering Career” (Prentice-Hall, 2010).
“I wrote this as a textbook for ECI, as an engineering career handbook, and with the aim of expanding the audience for ECI’s curriculum,” says Millar, who also is assistant dean for corporate relations in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “The book introduces readers to a thorough job-search process and to the business principles and people skills they will need to launch a successful career.
“’Ready for Takeoff!’ shows readers how to do an accurate self-analysis and to research the job market they are facing,” he continues. “The ultimate goal is to get the reader to land the best job he or she possibly can and to jumpstart their careers.”
The book provides new and prospective engineering graduates with the job-hunting and career advice that supplements an engineering curriculum, says Millar, who adds that the book is useful for students graduating with degrees in any field.
“Ready for Takeoff!” presents to readers the comprehensive subject range of UB’s ECI, during which 32 industrial and academic leaders teach students important career skills that complement academic coursework and are needed to be successful on the job. Topics include teamwork, leadership, entrepreneurship, project management, communication and total quality management, as well as graduate school and academic careers.
Millar, who spent 28 years in engineering human resources management at Union Carbide and Praxair, developed ECI to realize the visionary commitment of George C. Lee, formerly dean of UB Engineering. Support for ECI has been sustained by former deans Mark H. Karwan, now professor of industrial engineering, and Harvey G. Stenger, currently interim provost.
“We started ECI because we knew that industry had a keen interest in hiring technically trained people who also had broader personal and professional skills,” says Millar.
To date, more than 2,000 UB engineering students have successfully completed the semester-long, one-credit course. Many of them call the ECI course among the best and most useful courses they have ever taken.
ECI prepares students for co-op assignments at engineering firms in Western New York and worldwide as part of the process at UB that helps students identify jobs that match their skills and interests.
The book includes a first-person chapter on value engineering by UB alumnus Rick Licursi, an ECI graduate who is now technical development manager for Siemens PLM Software.
In the book, Licursi admits that the co-op assignment he landed through ECI was not initially his dream job: He was working at a food-manufacturing company and had to wear a hairnet at work.
Still, he recalls, the issue he was hired to address involved significantly increasing efficiency on a production line; he wondered briefly if he was up to the task.
Licursi goes on to recount how he applied his ECI coursework on value engineering to the problem. In the end, he was responsible for helping this national company achieve savings of a quarter million dollars a year.
Licursi now teaches value engineering to ECI students at UB.
And while Millar concedes the economy is still in recovery, a positive attitude is absolutely essential for job-hunters, he says.
“Choose optimism,” he says. “You’re in control and you don’t need to be a psychology major to understand what that means and to embrace it. It’s self-reliance in action. Be ready for takeoff. If you choose to be optimistic and take action toward the right goals, you will win.”
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