Message from the Chair

Abstract

It was a very quick year.  And for our students, it was a very good year.  Never has the job market been hotter for technical graduates, the potential for advancement better.  It wasn't uncommon for a professor's students to receive job offers approaching or even exceeding their own academic salaries.  If higher education is 3-5 years behind the curve, we should see improvement in funding... sometime.  At least that's what we all hope.  But while we wait, keep doing what we all do so well: prepare the world's best professionals in engineering and technology.

It was a tough year.  We lost a great friend in Rodger Payne.  Lauri O'Brien (lauri.obrien@autodesk.com.)has expressed Autodesk's continuing commitment in supporting our Division and its programs and will accept many of Rodger's responsibilities.  We also lost one of the great supporters of engineering graphics when George Beakley passed away this spring.  George was a former Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Arizona State, a long-time graphics author, and participant in ASEE and the EDGD.

It was a year of promise.  We saw many new faces, both in the audience and behind the podium, at both the Midyear meeting and the ASEE ANnual.  And we saw the return of several faces that we hadn't seen for a while.  Welcome back!  Several EDGD members have taken the initiative to secure funding to host meetings and symposia to further focus our discipline.  We were able to publish a comprehensive Journal Index of the years 1975-1996, as well as institute two new Division Awards.  We have members accepting positions and responsibilities within ASEE and other national and international technical societies, as well as within major corporations as part of sabbatical leave.  All in all, we have an active Division.

And finally, it was a year of thanks.  To those people who worked so hard to keep the business of our Division running—the Executive Committee, Mary Sadowski and Judy Birchman as successive Directors of Publications, Clyde Kearns (our rock), Kim Manner and Sheryl Sorby who coordinated a successful Midyear Meeting, and Bill Ross who put together a varied and interesting program at the Annual Meeting—you made my job less daunting.  To Mary Sadowski, our incoming Chair, hold the light high, leave your mark, and count on your colleagues in the EDGD to make your job easier.