Joe Horlen, who took the helm of the Department of Construction Science at Texas A&M University last year, has had a chance to survey his department, and he likes what he sees — but he’s also making plans to take Aggie construction science programs to the next level.
“We are really very fortunate that the quality of our students is top notch. I couldn’t ask for better students,” he said, “but we need to challenge them, push them, and be more rigorous in what we ask them to do. We need to raise that expectation level so they will be better qualified when they graduate to their first job and be better prepared for advancement in their companies,” he said.
Horlen has a large, extraordinary cast of faculty to help him achieve this task, the vast majority of which hold Ph.D. degrees.
“In most construction programs,” he said, “that’s not the case.”
“We have all kinds of faculty rather than a handful that are all engineers or all managers,” he said. “We have architects, engineers, managers, lawyers and business MBAs,” he said. “So if you look in the college directory, and look at all the degrees our people hold, it’s pretty impressive because that allows us to do many, many things we couldn’t do with a limited-size faculty or a limited-size program,” he said.
Having a large number of faculty also helps the department keep its program “in house.”
“We don’t have to rely on other departments offering courses for our students,” he said. “We teach most things internally using our own faculty. Many other programs, rather than offering a specific course, let’s say, in construction management, send their students to business school to take a management course. We are large enough that we can offer our own specialized version of a management course.”
Horlen is holder of the Charles Dewey McMillan Chair in Construction Sciences. He has a law degree from the Baylor University School of Law, a master’s degree in education and a bachelor’s degree in agricultural education from Texas A&M.
An associate professor in construction science, he has received numerous teaching honors since joining the Texas A&M faculty in 2002. He was named outstanding Junior Faculty member in 2005 by the National Association of Home Builders and Home Builders Institute. That same year he earned the Legal Affairs Best Paper Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering and Practice.
Though new technologies are affecting construction science today, Horlen sees a “low-tech” priority in his department, the need to enhance students’ oral and written communications skills.
“Most of our students go into the industry as assistant project managers and eventually become project managers,” he said. “Basically, the project manager’s role on a job is to run the job site and all the different parties that are on a job site: the plumbers, the electricians, all of the different labor contractors and suppliers, which basically means they’re in constant communication with these people, either orally, or in writing, or both, on a daily basis.”
The presence of all these trades, as well as the progress of the job itself, inevitably leads to conflicts requiring management through communication.
“Literally hundreds of conflicts occur on most jobs,” said Horlen. “Some have to do with two groups who are trying to do work in the same area on the same day, others have to do with changes an owner or architect makes,” he said.
Construction managers typically have to address myriad problems throughout the day, he said. For instance: “How do we sequence how they’re going to do the work? How do we resolve that? How do they do that? Who’s going to pay for that? When’s it going to get done? When’s the electrician going to come back and rewire?”
“Our graduates have to be able to communicate,” said Horlen, “because resolving those conflicts and moving the project forward is a communication issue. They’re going to spend their careers on the phone and writing reports and letters. They won’t ever drive a nail in a board!”
To this end, Horlen is instituting a plan to help students sharpen their communication skills.
“This fall,” he said, “we’re going to turn one of our existing classes into an oral communication class, emphasizing oral communication much like our writing classes emphasize writing assignments.”
The oral communication class will complement two writing intensive classes already in place.
“Our writing classes are really much better than they’ve been in the past and there’s two of them now, instead of just one, which will help.”
“We also need to move into the new technology in the industry now, things like Building Information Modeling (BIM) and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system (LEEDS),” he said. “We need to get out on the cutting edge of that. It’s come to the industry, and we need to be at the very front of it, not just following along. I think that’s something we have an opportunity to do, need to do, and really haven’t done yet.”
Horlen said the department is taking three actions to educate construction science students about BIM and LEED.
“One thing we can do is hire new, young faculty that have expertise in those areas, which we’re doing. Secondly, we need to train and educate our existing faculty to upgrade them in those areas, which we’re starting to do, and also, we’re inviting a lot of industry representatives into our classes to talk about those particular topics as well as other industry trends.”
In fall 2008, he said LEED elective courses will be available for students and the department is planning to launch a BIM course very soon.
Horlen is committed to seeing students being introduced to new things in the classroom from their teachers.
“I’ve asked every faculty member to add something new to their classes,” he said. “It’s up to each faculty member what that is, but I want something cutting edge, something new. I don’t want them teaching just like they taught last year.”
The idea, he said is to move out ahead of the curve and get in front of where the industry’s going.
“We should be the leader, we should be graduating people with the ability to go into a company and say, ‘here’s a better way of building, scheduling, or estimating.’”
Horlen is also striving to diversify the gender and ethnicity of his predominantly male department and he thinks that educating young people about construction science will help attract a more diverse pool of students.
To this end, the department recently hosted 33 students from the Houston ISD who expressed an interest in construction science. The high school students toured College of Architecture, visited a construction site on campus and got a taste of campus life and a feel for what a career in construction science might be like.
Additionally, he said, tapping graduates of the Texas A&M Construction Science program to speak to high school and junior high students could help more girls, as well as minority students, realize the world of construction science is open to them too.
“Most younger students don’t understand that there’s a management part of construction they can have a professional career in just like managing any other business. It’s not just about labor,” he said. “I don’t think many students in high school understand our students have wonderful job opportunities. They’re getting five or six written offers each when they graduate. In fall 2007, our graduates were starting out earning almost $55,000 a year. That’s very, very high for an undergraduate degree compared to most degrees right now,”
Horlen is also working to get a Ph.D. program in construction approved in the department.
“We have a proposal we’re continuing to work on,” he said. “We’ve finalized the draft and we’re discussing it with other programs on campus right now. It’s a slow process, so at best it would be two years before we could actually have a program. I’m optimistic we will get one.”
“It’s certainly not my job to fix this program. It’s in good shape,” he said. “I think my job is to take it to the next level. I believe the focus has got to be on the quality of education our students are getting in both our undergraduate and masters programs.”
“You can move forward in one of two ways,” he continued. “You can grow in numbers, which I don’t think we necessarily need to do, or you can grow in your quality and improve your quality, which I do believe we need to do to move forward to what the cutting edge of the industry is.”
