The graduates of the School of Engineering and Applied Science were instructed to think innovatively at the school’s Class Day Monday afternoon as Armen Avanessians, SEAS ’83 and a University trustee, emphasized the interdisciplinary nature of the world of engineering.
Avanessians, a director at the Goldman Sachs investment bank, majored in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before receiving his master’s degree from Columbia. He began his career designing circuits as part of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, were he said he was occupied with “doing the same thing over and over and over again, but you make it smaller.”
“That was engineering back then—becoming more and more proficient at a narrower and narrower task, knowing more and more about less and less until you knew everything about nothing,” he said.
Avanessians compared the new paradigm of today’s engineering world to “classical engineering” of years past, in which students studied and worked in highly specialized fields. “Today the problems that need to be solved are too complex, too interdependent, too interconnected to be neatly solved in such narrow ways. Today in engineering, the discipline is secondary—it’s the problem that needs to be solved,” he said.
SEAS Valedictorian Frank Zovko spoke similarly of the role of engineers in modern society. “As much as anything, our role is really to improve standard of living in one way or another,” he said. “This is what we found so appealing—the ability to contribute to change that has such wide-ranging effects.”
Zolkol described his memories in first-year Gateway Lab, a required class in which SEAS students design a project that will improve a part of the local community. “Most of us didn’t see how this related to what we were here to study, let alone how we could possibly complete something intended for the real world,” he said.
“As an engineering student you quickly realize that it’s almost impossible to make it through one course, let alone dozens of them, without a lot of help with your friends,” Zolkol added.
SEAS is “far ahead of the field” compared with other engineering schools in terms of teaching breadth and interdisciplinary approaches, Avanessians said. “At SEAS you’ve been exposed to great thinkers in every area of life. Do not abandon that interdisciplinary view now. Instead, salute the exceptional education you’ve received, take what you’ve studied, and apply it in the broadest possible way. Go out and conquer problems using everything and everyone you know.”
“Wisdom is not just expertise. It is knowing how much of various areas of expertise you need to know in order to make the decisions that the world needs and that you want to do,” University President Lee Bollinger added.