It's not a student, it's your professor

Crotchety old science professors are becoming a rarer breed, at least for students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

In the last five years alone, Penn's Engineering School has made a total of 35 new hires, and over half of Engineering faculty were hired within the last eight years, according to Engineering School Dean Eduardo Glandt.

And some of these professors are just a few years older than the students they teach.

"When I first started teaching at Penn, before people knew who I was, I was sometimes mistaken for a graduate student," said Computer Engineering professor Milo Martin, who started teaching in January of 2004 when he was 29 years old.

Records show that the average age of Engineering faculty hired in the last five years is just 33, according to Sandy Rathman, director of Faculty Affairs for the Engineering School. This is due to the fact that new faculty members are usually hired immediately after completing their post-doctoral fellowships.

The recent increase in young faculty hires comes as no surprise to Engineering administrators.

Bioengineering professor Jason Burdick attributes the recent massive faculty recruitment effort to the fact that "the Engineering School had undergone a rapid expansion 40 years ago, and as a result there is a large set of faculty who've reached retirement age."

According to Glandt, the 1960s expansion was a response to the Sputnik launches in the 1950s, which "caused a tremendous reaction, leading to an investment into the sciences."

Faculty of the "Sputnik generation" are now in their 70s or older, Glandt said.

While Penn says goodbye to some longtime members of its faculty who have retired, a surge of young faculty are coming in to take their place, and many Engineering administrators see this as a positive thing.

"People are coming to Penn fresh out of other labs, bringing new twists and new ideas," Burdick said.

Fernando Pereira, chairman of the Computer and Information Sciences department, had a similar reaction.

"I love having groups of young, energetic colleagues, who are bringing ideas from the outside and new approaches to teaching," he said.

According to Pereira, many Engineering courses have had "great success" due to curriculum revisions made by new faculty.

Pereira credits Martin for making "Introduction to Computer Architecture," a course offered by the Computer and Information Science Department, "much more hands-on."

Associate Engineering Dean Sampath Kannan agrees that new faculty are making positive improvements to the Engineering school.

"Young people are all doing cutting-edge things. Especially in engineering, there is a need to keep up with the latest research," he said.

In addition to bringing new ideas, younger faculty are also likely to have good rapport with their students, simply due to the fact that they are closer in age, said Glandt.

Still, some students appreciate having more senior professors. "I like having older teachers," Engineering junior Eric Fisher said. "Young teachers may not have as much teaching experience."

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