Preface: Howthis Book Came To Be And For Whom It Is Written

• Author: Joseph P. Kennedy/Wayne H. Watkins/Elyse N. Ball (With)
• Profession: Distinguished Professor of Polymer Science and Chemistry at The University of Akron/Associate Vice President for Research at The University of Akron/Project Manager for the University of Akron Research Foundation
• Pages: 11-17

PREFACE: HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO

BE AND FOR WHOM IT IS WRITTEN

This book is mainly for graduate students in the sciences and engineering,

but can be of use to educators, non-patent attorneys, and business people.

Joseph P. Kennedy.

I am an industrial scientist/researcher transplanted

to academia (a re-tread we would say in Akron). After 13 years in the polymer

and petrochemical industries I came to The University of Akron, where I

have been teaching and doing research for the last 40 years. I decided to join

academia not because I didn’t make it in industry but because I wanted to do

my thing my own way. I loved industrial research and was a little sad when I

came to the conclusion that the time had come to change.

When I got to the university, I knew pretty well what kind of research I

wanted to do but hadn’t made up my mind about the courses I wanted to

teach. Because it was easy for me I decided to give a course on “Cationic

Polymerizations,” a field I knew and wantedto do research in. Thus, I created

a course, and the students who took it seemed interested. I noticed that the

most animated questioning always arose during the presentation of industry-

oriented material.

This was an eye opener and led me to the idea of writing a course of things

industrial for budding mission-directed scientists on the threshold of leaving

our program and entering the industrial market. To justify my course, I had to

know how many of our students actually went to industry, who exactly were

our industry “clients,” and what our clients really wanted and needed. A little

surveying revealed that, by far, most of our Ph.D. and M.S. graduates went to

industry, and only a few went to government and academia.

xi