Alumni

Jack Real began his aviation career two years after graduating from Michigan Tech with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1937. He joined Lockheed Aircraft as a design engineer in 1939, flew for Pan Am during World War II, then worked as a test pilot and flight test engineer for Lockheed until 1965, when he became vice president and general manager of the Lockheed Rotary Wing Division. He became Howard Hughes chief . . .

Patently Prolific by Marcia Goodrich Two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, the Greek mathematician Hero came up with the idea for the steam turbine. English engineer Sir Charles Parsons built the first one in 1884, to generate electricity. And for the last twenty years, Steven Burdgick has fiddled, tweaked, and tinkered with steam turbines and their close cousins, gas turbines, ultimately revolutionizing . . .

Britta graduated from Michigan Tech with a BS in Mathematics in 2002 and an MS in Mechanical Engineering in 2004. She is currently an Engineering Project Team Leader at Caterpillar, Inc. in Peoria, Illinois. As team leader in Caterpillar’s Medium Tractor Products division, Britta is responsible for all aspects of product value for tractors, including regular reporting and tracking of production costs, new product . . .

John Drake is serious about giving back to his alma mater. He attributes his success in large part to "the training and rigor of a Michigan Tech education with its insistence on understanding." Drake earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1964 and a master’s in business administration in 1969. "Nobody was better prepared to understand and solve problems than Tech grads were," he says. . . .