Was It Something I Said?
Novel Jobs Require Analytic Talent
By Vijay Mehrotra
My undergraduate advisor at St. Olaf College was a mathematics professor named Theodore A. Vessey. During the many courses I took from him — and during frequent conversations in his office — I learned a great many lessons, both about math and about the life of a college professor. It was Ted who helped pick me up after a whopping 62 on my first calculus midterm. It was Ted who convinced me that I could learn a thing or two from a summer at an IBM sales office. And it was Ted who suggested that operations research might be an interesting career to explore, and that Stanford might be a fine place to conduct this exploration.
Sometime soon, Ted will be retiring from the St. Olaf faculty after 34 years. During his career there, including more than a dozen years as department chair, Ted has played a crucial role in building an extraordinary undergraduate mathematics program. To get a sense of its breadth and depth, consider the following: At a college that graduates roughly 700 per year, during the period from 1980-89, more than 500 students graduated with mathematics majors, and an astonishing 50 of us completed Ph.D.s in mathematics or a related field. During a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, St. Olaf ranked No. 1 among four-year colleges in the number of mathematical sciences Ph.D.s produced, and No. 6 overall, behind only Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago and Cal Tech.
What was the secret to this success? Ted would be quick to credit his colleagues (most of whom he recruited to St. Olaf and supported once they came), but there's more to the story than that. From my perspective, the real secret was Ted's belief that mathematics was not merely a playground for theoretical researchers but a core part of a liberal arts education, a rigorous and disciplined way of thinking from which everyone could benefit, and that it could and should be fun. By instilling these values into everything that the department did, Ted's mathematics department was, improbably, an attractive place for students. My life and career were greatly enriched from having passed through the Mathematics Building at St. Olaf.
My own experience as a faculty member at San Francisco State University is on the surface astonishingly different. I teach statistics, operations management and other quantitative courses at a large, bustling, urban public university, rather than a quiet and pastoral private liberal arts college. Few of my undergraduates or MBAs are intrinsically interested in the content of my courses, and even fewer are inclined to see the beauty embedded in the models and equations. To wit, in a recent e-mail, one of my students told me that perhaps my passion in the classroom might be a bit misguided: "You might want to realize that most students simply want to pass your class. They are likely to dedicate more of their time/effort to their other courses..."
Against this backdrop, I draw strength and motivation from one of Ted's favorite quotes: "According to some research in the late 1970s, within 25 years, 75 percent of you will end up with jobs that haven't been invented yet." Ted would cite this as evidence of why it was so critical for us to work hard to develop our intellectual capabilities, values and judgment, because in our lifetimes we were going to be thrown into things that we simply could not anticipate. Of course mathematics, and the critical thinking skills that we would gain through learning math, would be important in that future.
Well, that future — novel jobs that require analytic talent, deep domain expertise and a plethora of other skills — is here, and I've been bumping into it all summer. My old roommate Randy Garland, who studied mechanical engineering and planned to make his living designing wheelchairs, has just launched a thriving new business helping individuals and small businesses with computer acquisition, maintenance, training, networking and virus defense (for those in the Boston area, you can reach him at randy.garland@comcast.net). One of my undergraduates, Kevin Mello, prepares for a career in major league baseball management by working with me on a paper developing Markov models of runs scored during the World Series (see http://philbirnbaum.com/btn2004-02.pdf). I meet old friends of my father's who specialize in helping private college admissions and financial aid officers understand forecasting, proactive planning and yield management, concepts that are still relatively foreign to the not-for-profit sector (www.itsacademic.com/). On a factory floor, I encounter an SFSU alumnus (major: International Relations) who has become inexplicably obsessed with inventory reduction and quality improvement. On a plane, I bump into a former environmental engineer who has started a company that uses its own proprietary software technology to help large retailers manage their relationships with third-party local delivery firms (www.ensenda.com). If you're scoring at home, that makes them an outsourcer who helps their clients manage their outsourcers.
So my students don't think they need to learn what I have to teach them? Very well. It's part of my job to help them see how statistics and O.R. connect to a future that neither they nor I can quite see yet.
Thanks, Ted, for showing me how it's done and that it's worth doing. I'm traveling down that same road now, even though the scenery is quite different around here.
Vijay Mehrotra (drvijay@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, and an operations management consultant.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2004 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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