February 2001 President's Desk Students Serve as Vital Link By James Bean INFORMS President jbean@umich.edu Former INFORMS President Arthur Geoffrion highlighted the "shared destiny" of OR/MS practitioners and academics. The success of either group is optimized by the success of, and interaction with, the other. Many initiatives in the past few years have enhanced the value of INFORMS membership for practitioners and academics alike, including the new Practice meeting, expanded importance of subdivision meetings, electronic publishing, INFORMS Online, expanded public relations and many others. New initiatives for the coming year include a practice portal to INFORMS Online and additional customization features for INFORMS Online and electronic publications. To enhance this shared destiny, we must redouble efforts to link academics and practitioners and to build understanding of the contributions each segment makes to our field. Perhaps the most identifiable link between academics and practitioners is students. Students are the lifeblood of academia and the business world, and they add new talent with cutting-edge technical skills. These students are the most effective means of technology transfer from the university to industry. Their lifelong allegiances to their alma maters form the backbone of many university/industry relationships. Students of OR/MS can, and should, play that same role of integrating the practice and academic contingencies within INFORMS. For this reason, I find it particularly alarming that student membership of INFORMS declined about 10 percent last year. The recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed an increase in the count of "Operations Research Analysts" of roughly 40 percent more than the previous census, so the issue is not relevance of OR/MS. We need to attract new students to the Institute for many reasons, among them to help bridge the gap between practitioner and academic members. Student chapters and geographic chapters offer one mechanism for linking academics and practitioners. Closer cooperation between geographic chapters and student chapters at nearby universities could help practitioners get to know potential hires and let students know of opportunities in OR/MS practice. Faculty advisors involved with student chapters will come in contact with local practitioners and interesting problems. Activities such as joint seminars or panel discussions of current activities in OR/MS could be developed. There are isolated examples of such cooperation, but a broader scale engagement of chapters and student chapters would benefit all sides. Internships are another mechanism for linking academics and practitioners. Students who spend a summer interning in an OR/MS group or who take a co-op semester to work in an OR/MS group can enhance academic-practitioner interaction as well as benefit the firm, the academy and student. For the firm, it amounts to a long interview that can result in a good hire. For the student, it is an opportunity to gain real insight into the working world and to refine interests in work styles and industries. It is also an opportunity to improve teamwork and communication skills in a setting that is difficult to replicate in a classroom. For academic advisors, it is an opportunity to gain industry contacts and learn about real problems. Below are two internship programs that have strong industry-academy interaction mixed with an internship experience. There are many other models. MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) program requires that all students do a six-month internship leading to a thesis. Advisors from business and engineering participate in each internship. While the topic of all projects is manufacturing, very broadly defined, many of the projects have substantial OR/MS content. As an example, last year student Toni Albers worked with Professors Donald Rosenfield and Stanley Gershwin and utilized non-linear programming tools to determine the optimal quarterly sales skew at Dell Computer. In another project, student Michael Dickinson worked with Professors Anna C. Thornton and Stephen C. Graves to present an approach to account for and quantify the interdependencies of technology projects at The Boeing Company. The University of Michigan's Tauber Manufacturing Institute (TMI) also addresses activities of manufacturing companies and requires students to participate in Team Projects in industry resulting in a consulting report. These projects typically involve three students from a variety of engineering and business disciplines working as a team. As an example from last year, students Sumit Bhandari, Eric Bieberich and Jeremy Florence worked with Professors Colin Kessinger and James Bean to develop a model of capacity bottlenecks at Steelcase Corp. This project made extensive use of queueing networks. In a project at Copeland Corporation, students Allison Algaier, Matthew Neagle and Elizabeth Tahmoush, working with Professors Jan Shi and Robert Haessler, implemented a pull system to manage overseas inventories and reduce the effects of highly volatile demand patterns. INFORMS can play a role in facilitating such internships in OR/MS. We could post on INFORMS Online descriptions of programs such as those mentioned above. We could expand the internship portion of the Job Placement Service. We welcome other ideas. By enhancing the links between practitioners and academics through students we can strengthen the "shared destiny" as well as add value for student members. I would appreciate feedback from members on ways INFORMS can facilitate these or other interactions. Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 2001 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 2001 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.