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William Schindel felt right at home when he studied at
Rose Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s, and he's rarely
strayed far from home. After graduating in 1969, he spent
a short time in New York, designing airborne military systems
and innovation tools for IBM Federal Systems. But,
he soon returned and earned a master's degree from the
institution that had just been renamed Rose-Hulman. He
has maintained close ties ever since.
In the 1970s, Schindel was involved in
starting Applied Computing Devices, a Terre Haute company that
supplied specialized computer systems for the telephone
industry. It grew to about 170 employees before being
acquired in the 1990s. At the same time, his relationship
with Rose-Hulman included teaching math, electrical
engineering, and computer science as a faculty
member, and directed the computing center. He earned
tenure status, then left to pursue
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other business ventures.
Maybe "left" is not the correct way to
describe Schindel's move to launch International Centers
for Telecommunication Technology in 1983. That's because
the company, now ICTT System Sciences, had startup ties to
Rose-Hulman, and has employed interns, faculty, and
graduates.
The firm's focus pertains to
systems engineering, an increasingly
important engineering field that diagnoses and cures what
Schindel describes as complexity sickness. "It arose
in aerospace in the 1950s," he explains, and has since
spread to other industries that have grown increasingly
complex and started to suffer from the ills
of disorganized system complexity,
including telecommunications, healthcare, and
the automotive industry.
As that joint venture was getting up and running,
Schindel joined Rose-Hulman's
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Board of Trustees in 1984.
The complexity ICTT deals with on a daily
basis is something engineers of all stripes must be prepared
to tackle. Rose-Hulman is responding nicely, Schindel
says, "looking for effective ways to respond to what companies
say future graduates need." The recently added master's
degree program in systems engineering is one answer to
industry demands that speaks to Schindel's interests and
expertise.
"Rose-Hulman is doing a good job of
strategic planning," he adds, being impressed with how
planners are using the concept of modeling to
understand the institute and its relationship with
the outside world. It's a vast improvement over
from-the-gut planning that is not as objective and
evidence-based. "In strategic planning, it's a way to have
everybody on the same sheet of music," he says.
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