The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/277771
Spring 2014 49 if... campaign gain valuable experience out in the world. It's an appropriate honor for Adams's late father, without whom Adams might never have found his way to WPI. A surveyor with the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, Adams Sr. never got the chance to go to college. But he worked with WPI-trained engineers on major projects, such as the construction of Interstate 91 through Western Massachusetts, and their skills impressed him. "He always wanted me to go to WPI," the son says. "The best engineers, he said, had all gone to WPI." At frst, Adams went in a different direction, enrolling at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. But when he decided to transfer to a college closer to home for his junior year, he found only one school that combined the opportunity to delve deeply into technical subjects with the expectation of social responsibility. His father, Adams says, "was thrilled." At WPI, where Adams's friends knew him as "Bud," he soon gained a reputation as a clever student who wouldn't hesitate to help a struggling classmate study for a big exam—or to dress up as a member of Sgt. Pep- per's Lonely Hearts Club Band to give his pals a laugh. His friend and fellow civil engineering major Andy Kopach '76 says he could tell Adams was "going places," and that he had taken to heart WPI's requirement that students understand how the technical skills they were mastering ft into the wider world. "You needed to know your feld and to do something more, go beyond that." At the time, WPI had recently adopted the WPI Plan, and students, especially through their IQPs and MQPs, were expected to solve real- world problems and understand the impact they would have on peo- ple. "It was looking at not 'How high can you build a building, or how big can you build a dam?' but 'How does that interact with the people that are going to be a part of it?'" Adams recalls. Today, he says, that's the primary focus of MWH projects around the world. "If we're going to build a dam in Latin America, if we're going to open a mine," he says, "we need to understand what the local population thinks about the project, what their concerns are—and make sure those are ad- dressed." As an example, Adams recalls working on a mining project in Peru, where the local community was concerned about the impact on their water supply. After listening to the residents' concerns, the MWH team realized that if they upgraded a nearby wastewater treatment plant, the mine could use the treated water instead of drawing from the river. It was a solution that worked for everyone, Adams says. "It's called the 'social li- cense to operate,'" he explains. "I go back 40 years at WPI, and they were thinking about that then!" Even today, Adams says, WPI graduates seem to be ahead of their peers in their understanding of how their work fts into the world. But the project centers, the number of which has rapidly expanded over the past few years, offer students a way to broaden their perspec- tive even further. And that, he believes, will help them become the next generation of successful engineers. —Amy Crawford FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO, his father, Myles McDonough, quit his job to begin making plastic flm laminates for women's shoes and handbags in a rented garage in Spencer, Mass. With no bank loans or venture capital and using parts from old washing machines to make equipment, he started the business that became FLEXcon, a maker of pressure-sensitive flms and adhesives with more than 1,000 employees worldwide and annual sales of $300 million. "He always had the bug to run his own business," Neil Mc- Donough said in an interview in his offce at FLEXcon's gleaming headquarters off Route 9 in Spencer, not far from the old ambu- lance garage where his father started it all. To honor the late McDonough's entrepreneurial spirit and his connection to WPI as a trustee, Neil and his mother, Jean, have donated $1 million to help other innovators turn their ideas into commercial enterprises. Their donation will help fund the McDonough Business Incubator, part of the conversion of Alumni Gym to an innovation studio that will also include a robotics laboratory, project and classroom space, an instrumental lab, tech suites, and an atrium to display innovations and achievements of WPI students and alumni. Mark Rice, vice provost for innovation and entrepreneurship, says the business incubator will be "a living lab for innovation and entrepreneurship" and the physical home for what he calls the virtual incubator that has existed for a year and a half. In WPI's virtual incubator, named the Tech Advisors Network (TAN), WPI alumni and friends with extensive entrepreneurial experience provide early-stage entrepreneurs with mentoring, networking, and connections to resources. Once the McDonough Business In- cubator is in place, there will be space for early-stage entrepre- neurs to meet with other entrepreneurs, with their TAN profes- sionals, with WPI Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, and with WPI faculty. A WPI Accelerator Fund is also being established, making McDonough Legacy Spurs Innovation Neil McDonough has a special appreciation for innovation and entrepreneurship. WPI_spring14_Advancement.indd 49 3/9/14 2:16 PM