Expansion Engineer
A leader propels an urban institute toward full university status.
By Jennifer Pocock
Zorica Pantić is a first—the first female engineer to lead a higher-education institution of technology in the United States—but more important, she’s a builder. When she arrived a little over 10 years ago, the Wentworth Institute of Technology was a small four-year school mostly serving commuters. Pantić set her sights on transforming it into a university, a prize that’s now within her grasp.
“This year, as planned, Wentworth satisfied all conditions for university status as required by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education,” says Pantić. Those conditions include offering at least four distinct graduate programs in different professional fields of study, with “additional faculty, facilities, and resources necessary to support sound graduate programs.” Wentworth now qualifies with master’s degree programs in architecture, management, civil engineering, and applied computer science.
On her first day at the school, located in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood, Pantić began analyzing Wentworth’s challenges and opportunities. She sought input from the faculty, staff, students, and trustees, while also gathering feedback from other institutional presidents. “They helped me trace a path to the next level of excellence for the institute,” she says.
While striving to achieve university status, Pantić has also introduced six new engineering programs and a three-year accelerated applied math program. She heavily emphasizes interdisciplinary learning, both through a brand-new interdisciplinary engineering degree and through general education requirements for all degrees. Wentworth students are encouraged to take liberal arts and music courses through a consortium with five other schools called the Colleges of the Fenway.
She is also developing the facilities, building a student Campus Center and expanding the library with a dramatic $15 million renovation. Together with a strong co-op program and study-abroad options, Pantić is paving the way to produce well-rounded students who can easily enter the workforce.
Unlike regional powerhouses MIT, Tufts, Harvard, and Boston University, Wentworth has no intention of becoming a new research-driven university, Pantić says. True to its vocational heritage, Wentworth is intent on providing students with the skills they will need to fuel the economy in the immediate future.
Overall, Pantić wants people to see Wentworth as a “school of opportunity.” That’s no mere slogan; Her own record is one or recognizing opportunities and working to make the most of them. Pantić arrived in the United States from Serbia in 1984 on a Fulbright Scholarship, having earned a bachelor’s, master’s, and a doctoral degree from the University of Nis. All her degrees were in electrical engineering, a field she had wanted to pursue from a young age. Pantić fondly remembers dismantling a radio owned by her father (also an electrical engineer) and putting it back together as a child. “It fascinated me that you could take all of those components, put them together, and create sound.”
Following an academic career in applied electromagnetics, Pantić realized that she could help more students as an administrator than by teaching alone. She went on to direct the School of Engineering at San Francisco State University and became founding dean of engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She didn’t consider a presidency until she met the female principal of her son’s school. “I talked to her and I thought, wow, maybe I could do that.”
Pantić is now focused on attracting more women to the institute. So far, she has doubled the female student population to 20 percent—placing it on a par with the rest of the country, but still too low, she says—and expanded the number of female faculty members. This year she received a $100,000 grant to provide scholarships to more female undergraduates.
Wentworth also hosts Girl Scouts for technical and engineering activities with volunteers from the Society of Women Engineers. “Girls do as well as boys in math until they get to middle school, but then they lose their confidence,” she says. “They think they can’t do math or engineering. It is important to support them and show them great role models.”
Her greatest mission, Pantić says, is to convince all students that, “no matter what discipline they pursue in engineering, they will have a positive impact on society.” How is this possible, when we don’t even know what jobs of the future will look like? One answer is entrepreneurship. “This economy of the 21st century,” she said, “is an innovation economy.” An extracurricular Accelerate program funds student groups with business ideas. Their jobs will be ones they create.
Jennifer Pocock is assistant editor of Prism.
Image Courtesy of Zorica Pantić