Page 31 - ME-07-E

another scientist teaches you, and
that teaching needs to be personal.
And because we refused to lower our
teaching criteria, we saw the negative
impact reflected in the test scores.

“In the long term, looking at things
to come, I see that high school stu-
dents also suffered during those
years. The quality of their education
went down, and they received ac-
commodations in the matriculation
exams as a result. This worsens the
already significant disparity between
the level of high school graduates
and the level of proficiency required
from university students. We had to
put in a lot of effort to close that gap.

“The good news in all of this is that
as dean, I had the full cooperation
and support of all of our faculty and
staff, including the IT team. They did
everything in their power to minimize
the impact on the students. But we
were all very happy when we could go
back to teaching in person.”

“The private sector “An academic career is a long and arduous journey:
is looking for strong you need to finish your PhD, go overseas for your
foundations. The rest post-doc, come back as junior faculty, work hard to
they can teach”
move up the ladder, get tenure, and so on.”
The pandemic was not the only
challenge Gendelman faced. Before but I have since realized it doesn't ates?” Their answer was as surpris-
the pandemic, he had had a list of ob- work that way,” he says. “Even before ing as it was unequivocal: “we want
jectives. At the top of that list was his I became dean, we had started a pro- strong foundations.” Put simply, in-
plan to thoroughly reexamine the fac- cess at our faculty where we would dustry values exceptional mastery of
ulty’s very definition of itself. He ex- meet with our most distinguished the foundational disciplines—math-
plains: “We asked ourselves ‘what is alumni, people who represented ematics, physics and engineering.
mechanical engineering? What fields companies that employed many of It turned out that nobody expected
does it cover? Which faculty members our graduates, and ask them “what graduates to know the latest software
should we recruit? What should our do you want to see in fresh gradu- on their first day. They clearly stated
undergraduate program look like?”

The last question, in particular,
is not an abstract issue. It is closely
tied to changes in the job market our
alumni end up entering. “Up until four
years ago, I thought our alumni need-
ed to know every new development,

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering | MEgazine | 31