Education/Energy: Expanding power options: The power industry´s long-term challenges offer exciting opportunities to students. But do they know it?

While industrialists and educators argue about the pros and cons of power engineering curricula, most EE students remain indifferent to power engineering as a profession. Why? The reason may well be one expressed at the recent IEEE Power Engineering Society´s Winter Meeting by John Hancock, dean of engineering, Purdue University, who said: ¿Despite the recent emphasis on energy needs, power engineering has a serious image problem.¿ His statement was mild compared to that of a Virginia Polytechnic Institute student who, at a rap session the next day, expressed the same conviction in these words: ¿There is a stigma attached to the idea of becoming a power engineer. A lot of undergraduate students feel that power engineers are a bunch of old codgers who´ve done the same thing the same way for 100 years. This feeling is particularly directed toward engineers working with the utilities.¿