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Professor and Head Nicholas P. Jones (left) accepts the CN gift
from Peter Marshall,
vice-president of CN’s Gulf Division.
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Canadian National Railway Company (CN) established a $400,000
endowment this spring to support graduate education in the Railroad
Engineering Program. CN company representatives announced the
gift April 4 to a gathering of students, CEE faculty, and friends
of the department during one of Associate Professor Chris Barkan’s
railroad engineering classes in Grainger Engineering Library Information
Center. The endowment will support two graduate students each
year.
“I’m extremely proud to be here,” said Peter
C. Marshall, vice-president of CN’s Gulf Division. “This
is a really important event for us. We want to be part of a first-class
effort in railroad engineering and in civil engineering.”
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Marshall mentioned CN’s 1999 merger with Illinois Central
Corporation and talked about CN’s “rags to riches”
story, in which the company went from losing $100 million a
year to its current position as “the most productive,
most efficient, best cash flow, most profitable on a unit basis”
railroad in North America.
“It happened because of the individuals that are working
at the railroad,” Marshall said. “Steel and electronics
and technology only take you so far, and everyone’s got
pretty much the same kinds of tools to work with. It’s
the quality of the people who are making those tools come to
life, the interaction with customers, and the interaction amongst
ourselves that really have made the difference. It’s for
those reasons that we feel really strongly about reaching out
into the community and aligning ourselves with the absolute
best in the business. You folks represent that here at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”
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From left to right: Chris Barkan, Nicholas
P. Jones, Peter Marshall and David Lowe. |
CEE Professor and Head Nicholas
P. Jones thanked CN for a generous investment in education.
“I like to think that this is just the start of this
relationship, that with this as a starting point, we’ll
continue to grow and develop a deeper relationship with
CN, driven by both our educational mission and our research
mission, and I look forward to participating in that,”
Jones said.
“This is a generous and significant commitment on
the part of CN to this program. It is critically important
to us, and on behalf of the University, the College of Engineering
and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
I would like to personally thank CN for their generosity.”
Railroad Engineering Program Director Associate Professor
Chris Barkan spoke on the long legacy of railroad engineering
at Illinois.
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“My reason for acknowledging all of these individuals
today, of course, is that without the vision, efforts
and dedication of any one of them, I think there is a
considerable doubt that we still would have a railroad
engineering program at Illinois, and without that, I’m
not sure we’d be here today to thank CN for their
generous gift in support of our mission to educate the
next generation of railroad engineering professionals.”
Department alumnus David Lowe (MS 77), Head of Engineering
for CN’s Gulf Division, also spoke to the class
about the importance of developing both engineering and
leadership skills during their time at Illinois.
“Join something like the concrete canoe team,”
Lowe said. “You’re working with a diverse
set of people, you’ve got a time schedule, you’ve
got to look for funds, make sure you get your checks in
on time, make sure you send your checks off, look for
the right kind of material. You have an engineering challenge
designing it, but the big part is learning to work as
a team, working together, and when it’s all done
you get to go play in the water and beat up on other schools.
As students here, work to seek out such similar opportunities
to work on those leadership skills.”
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