As engineers, our work does not begin and end with problem solving through elegant equations or optimized modeling.
The most impactful solutions we create must also navigate context—from budgets, regulations, and organizational timelines to aesthetics and cultural expectations. That is why our partnerships with external organizations—corporations, research sponsors, government labs, and nonprofits—are not ancillary to an engineering education; they are essential to how engineering is taught and learned.
This issue highlights how partnerships prepare students for real practice. Take undergraduate Talia Hovsepian’s gap year with an F1 racing team in London: While translating raw data into race strategy, she discovered that insights must be actionable under extreme time pressure and strict parameters. Students in our Sports Analytics Research Group work with professional teams to produce analyses that optimize performance while requiring deep knowledge of team needs and sport regulations. In a past issue, we reported on important, corporate collaboration, the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Artificial Intelligence, which lets graduate students work with industry mentors to develop customer-driven products.
Beyond domain knowledge, these partnerships teach students accountability: how to set milestones, report progress, and revise plans when obstacles arise. These are professional habits that cannot be fully learned in isolation; they bring students face-to-face with the messiness of implementation.
Even as the tools we use to solve problems evolve rapidly—driven largely by advances in AI and machine learning—there is no virtual substitute for the experience of working directly with external clients and the iterative process of adjusting needs, expectations, financial constraints, and unforeseen challenges.
I’m proud of the rich range of real-world experiences we provide which equip our students with the judgment, resilience, and professional habits they’ll need to lead responsibly in industry, academia, and public service.
Thank you for all that you do.
Ed Schlesinger
Benjamin T. Rome Dean
Illustration by Joel Kimmel