4/27/2023 Michael O'Boyle
Rasoul Etesami has been selected for The James Franklin Sharp Outstanding Teaching Award, given to ISE faculty members who demonstrate undergraduate teaching excellence in Industrial Engineering.
Written by Michael O'Boyle
Rasoul Etesami has been selected for The James Franklin Sharp Outstanding Teaching Award, given to ISE faculty members who demonstrate undergraduate teaching excellence in Industrial Engineering.
Etesami strongly believes that undergraduate courses should meet students’ needs regardless of their career path. Since most students will seek jobs in industry, he always makes a point of incorporating project work and practice with the current tools used in industry when designing his courses.
He also believes that courses should be welcoming to all students, creating and choosing course material to be as inexpensive and accessible as possible. He strives to make the coursework challenging and engaging without being so difficult as to discourage students.
For Etesami, the greatest reward of teaching is watching students succeed. “I always enjoy witnessing their success in their career, especially if I hear that the courses that I taught them played a role in their success,” he said. “Nothing is more rewarding for a teacher than seeing the success of their students.”
Etesami usually teaches SE 320: Control Systems and advises a group of students for SE 494/495: Engineering Senior Design. He has been included in the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent four times for the following courses:
• ECE 515: Control System Theory & Design
• IE 511: Integer Programming
• SE 320: Control Systems
The James Franklin Sharp Outstanding Teaching Award was endowed with a gift from Dr. James Franklin Sharp of New York, New York (originally from Chester, Illinois). Dr. Sharp received a BSIE from the University of Illinois in 1959 and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. After faculty positions at Rutgers University and New York University and a management position at AT&T, he founded SHARP SEMINARS in New York, which became a leading provider of training for the three-year series of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA®) Exams.