Michael Marcellin Makes ‘Thinking Like an Engineer’ Top Educational Priority
Popular ECE professor puts three decades of experience to work supporting student clubs and helping undergraduates get real-world experience.
Michael Marcellin and team members Ryan Jarick, Tyler Wong, Justin Kim, Jennifer Nadolski, Nathan Lam, Faisal Abdi and Bennett Estrada get set to test their airplane for the 2021 Arizona Autonomous competition.
Every semester, Michael Marcellin, Regents’ Professor of electrical and computer engineering, tells his students the story of how he became an engineer.
He was working in construction as an electrician in California’s Death Valley. On one particularly grueling, 120-degree summer day as he and his coworkers finished up, their boss went inside to fetch a man from an air-conditioned office. The man came outside, looked over a couple of items, told everyone they’d done a great job, then went back into his nice, cool office.
“I asked my boss, ‘Who’s that guy?’” Marcellin recalled. “He said, ‘He’s the engineer.’ And in September of that year, I was studying engineering.”
