Do you recognize this picture? When and where was it taken? Who are the students? If you know, email us, and we'll post the answer on the website. To help us keep things straight, please reference Mystery Picture 03.

Mystery Picture 02 Solved! Except for those sideburns....



I was the graduate-student instructor in that specific electrical engineering lab. I believe the photo was taken in the spring semester on 1974, and the course was a lower-division course on electronic circuits, which I taught.

The students are using a signal generator (far left and partially out of the photo), a resistor substitution box (center black box), and an oscilloscope (right, Tektronix 503) to test a circuit they have assembled (behind the student's left hand). You can still find that oscilloscope and signal generator in used-equipment stores; however, there are modern renditions of the same equipment (all solid-state) that have replaced them in today's courses.

Jim Hamerly
Ph.D. EE, 1975

Mystery Picture o1 Solved - Who was that Girl?

A photo from the 1975 yearbook was published in the Fall 2003 issue of Carnegie Mellon Engineering Magazine. I was that young lady using a scanning electron microscope with Dr. Larry Vassamillet. I believe we were working on my Senior Thesis, examining ores.

After graduation I attended University of British Columbia (Master’s, Applied Science), went to work in the Steel Industry, then went back to graduate school at Virginia Tech (Ph.D.) and became a faculty member at VT. I am now on the faculty at New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology in the Materials Engineering Department.

I am married to Ken Tully (EE, '76) and our son Arvonn Tully graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2000 (BS Biology, '00). We also have two daughters who are still in high school.

Things have changed greatly in engineering education and in the engineering field in general since I was an undergraduate. There are many more women and other minorities in engineering. Some things have improved, and some things haven't changed.

Deidre Hirschfeld
(B.S., MSE 1975)