Whenever Professor John Ochs walks around Lehigh’s campus—as he has done quite frequently for nearly 40 years—he likes to help visitors who appear to be lost.
Recently, Ochs noticed a car with an out-of-state license plate as it pulled to the curb near the Wilbur Annex. He walked over to offer directions.
“The woman rolled down the window and looked at me and said, ‘Professor Ochs! ... I took your class in 1980, the first CAD-CAM class. I was a female engineer. I took the class, and it has driven the rest of my entire professional life,’” Ochs recalls.
The woman, it turns out, didn’t need directions at all: She was picking up her daughter, a student at Lehigh.
“I said, ‘Well, you just made my day.’ To me, that’s what’s important,” says Ochs.
That influence, which Ochs has had over countless students, is a hallmark of a career dedicated to engineering education. Ochs will retire in 2019 after four decades at Lehigh. Those many years, he says, have presented him with “the opportunity to impact both how I teach and how students learn.”
As the founder and director of Lehigh's Technical Entrepreneurship (TE) program and director of the professional master's program (M. Eng) in Technical Entrepreneurship, Ochs’ impact is without question.
“If John were in charge of engineering education in America, it would be a transformation. It wouldn’t be just what we’re doing right now,” says his close colleague Jerry Lennon, past deputy provost for academic affairs and college associate dean, and current professor of water resources engineering.
Read the full story in the Lehigh University News Center
Story by: Kelly Hochbein
