Geoffrey Orsak, professor of Electrical Engineering and dean of the SMU School of Engineering, spoke about the importance of engineers and a new vision for engineering at SMU at Faculty Club luncheon yesterday.

The Faculty Club, now in its third year, sets up the luncheon, which is a series that happens every other month. The lunches are open to faculty, staff, alumni and students and are organized by the Faculty Club board, which consists of about 15 people.

“The board decided this was a good thing to bring the SMU community together to hear what is happening on campus,” said Dee Powell, a board member.

Marc Valerin, the president of the Faculty Club, thinks the luncheon is an opportunity to hear from higher administration officials and educators, which makes the series unique. He says it can improve academics by increasing communication between the different departments.

Orsak talked mostly about changes that he wanted to make in the engineering school, but also about SMU in general. Orsak thinks that engineers have a huge impact on society.

“Nearly everything you see or touch in a day has been designed by engineers,” Orsak said. “They play such a large, diverse role.”

Orsak wants to produce the best engineers possible here at SMU, and he thinks that now is the time to have students respond to education in a completely different way.

College campuses today are time capsules, according to Orsak, as the same classrooms are there, and the campus looks the same. He said that members of the university’s community can’t live in the past and have to start looking to the future, challenging students to be “better than we are.” Orsak, along with 12 other instructors, spend each day trying to make the engineering education program better.

In his quest to improve the program, Orsak and others asked senior-level executives what skills they wanted to see in engineers. Their first response was that students needed the ability to communicate. Additionally, executives wanted to see engineers have the ability to work in teams of diverse backgrounds.

Orsak said that engineering students aren’t exposed enough on the college campus to either of these attributes and that classes are geared too much toward the individual. He wants faculty to rethink and look at how classes are structured.

“We have to run at the head of the pack,” Orsak said. “That’s what we want at the engineering school and at all of SMU.”