Engineering Alumni Council

Letter from the EAC President

July 2026

As the President of the Engineering Alumni Council (EAC), I am constantly reminded through in-person experiences of Pratt’s relentless ambition to innovate, educate and better society. Staying connected to the university as an alumni volunteer has been incredibly rewarding for me, and for all my fellow alumni who also volunteer in some capacity, I trust you feel the same. But regardless of whether you are a current student, faculty, staff, alumni or friend of Pratt, I trust you feel a connection to the school. This is the focus of the EAC—to foster connectivity across the Pratt community.

This has been an exciting and active year for the EAC as we pursue our mission of connectivity. At our September and January meetings, we hosted panel discussions with current undergraduate and graduate students in which we discussed a wide range of topics about how to navigate one’s career post-graduation. In November, our regional engagement committee partnered with Engineering Student Government to host a virtual panel on careers in the health care and biotechnology sectors that received rave reviews from students and will be repeated for a different industry in the spring. Our work with Pratt-affiliated student project groups—all 29 of them—continues as they look to build their plans for the 2026–27 school year. Our awards committee selected three amazing award winners who were celebrated at our April banquet! And finally, our mentoring program continues to grow—we had almost 350 alumni mentors engaged with over 450 student mentees this past year. As one of those mentors, I can personally vouch for the depth of fulfillment that comes from engaging with current Pratt students.

In these efforts to foster connectivity across the Pratt community, I’m most encouraged by the sharing of learnings that are transferred from one member of the community to the next. I’d like to share a personal reflection that helps bring this to life. When I enrolled at Duke to study engineering, my parents gave me a copy of To Engineer is Human by Duke’s own Henry Petroski. The book was published many years before, but it still served as a fascinating and informative read for me as a first-year engineering student. Fast-forward to earlier this year, over two decades later, and a conversation I was having with a Pratt mentee. The discussion wasn’t about which course to take, how to structure a resume or what company to apply to for an internship. Rather, the questions my mentee asked were all about how I had learned from the challenges and failures of my career along the way. I recalled Dr. Petroski’s book, and the central thesis—that failure is inherent to the design process because engineering is a fundamentally human endeavor. And I realized how this concept had become something I embraced in my life—that failure, and the resulting lessons learned, were foundations of growth and future successes. The conversation that ensued with the mentee was one of the most rewarding I have ever had and a reminder of why I enjoy remaining connected to Pratt two decades later.

To all my fellow alumni out there—please consider how you can give back to the current community of students and other alumni by sharing your learnings and experiences. There is always room for one more mentor, for one more alumnus on a panel discussion with students or for one more applicant to serve on the EAC. There are so many great things happening today in Pratt. But I also know there are remarkable things happening in the lives of every Pratt community member—triumphs small and large that add to our community and our society broadly. I hope you have a chance to share what you’ve learned along the way, regardless of how your engineering journey has unfolded. Because here in the Pratt community, we are all engineers, we are all human and we all benefit from being connected to one another.

Andrew R. Schmidt E’06
President, Engineering Alumni Council