Engineers don’t normally find themselves being drooled on at work, but it comes with the territory when your “client” is a 1,900-pound draft horse with a sweet tooth. The horse, Fargo, thought Joseph Hirn, the software engineering student standing next to him, might have a peppermint in his hand; Fargo reached down to find out.
He wants the receptionist to move away from her computer. But he’s laughing. It could be the gun, which is plastic, and pink. It does sort of ruin the effect.
It could be that he’s new to this – not an actual police agent, but a student. An accounting major, of all things.
Students in the new Industrial Engineering major at Penn State Behrend will take a wider view. Their studies, which can lead to jobs in health care, manufacturing, transportation and inventory control, teach them to pinpoint inefficiencies in workflow and other interconnected business and manufacturing systems.
“When you’re working with a mock portfolio and you mess up, there’s no damage done,” said Vincent Intrieri, a 1984 graduate of Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
Kristan Wheaton, associate professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst University, and Matthew White, lecturer in game development at Penn State Behrend, are collaborating on a bias-teaching game.