Oral-History:Barry Shoop
About Barry Shoop
IEEE Fellow Barry Leroy Shoop, Ph.D., P.E., and retired Brigadier General, is the 2016 President of IEEE and CEO. In 2012, Shoop became an IEEE Fellow "for leadership in photonic signal and image processing for national security.” Previously, he became a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (2000), and the International Society for Optical Engineering (2003). In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and he is also a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi.
Shoop received a B.S. from the Pennsylvania State University (1980), an M.S. from U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California (1986), and a Ph.D. from Stanford University (1992), all in electrical engineering. He also received an M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island (2002). He is a licensed Professional Engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia (2011). His research interests focus on optoelectronic signal and image processing and analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion, including a major hardware implementation effort in the area of smart pixel technology. Applications include high-speed, high-resolution A/D conversion, two-dimensional artificial neural networks for digital halftoning, multispectral image processing, and wavelet transforms for radar signal processing. Recent research also includes disruptive technology and innovation and educational pedagogy. He has authored more than 150 archival publications as well as eight books and book chapters. He also holds one patent: B. L. Shoop, P. K. Das, and D. M. Litynski. Photonic Analog-to-Digital Converter Based on Temporal and Spatial Oversampling Techniques, U.S. Patent Number 6,529,150, March 4, 2003.
Born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1957, Shoop and his family moved to “a fairly rural area of” Pennsylvania when he was twelve years old where he took up hunting and fishing as hobbies.
While attending high school he worked full time, first at a chicken processing plant and then at a lumber mill. His supportive parents did not push college, but his father advised “you want to study electronics, that is the future.” Shoop recalled, ““my family was not particularly well off in terms of finances. I ended up paying my own way for the first year of college and then I got an [Army] ROTC scholarship that paid for the balance of the three years.” Before graduating from Penn State in 1980, Shoop married his high school sweetheart Linda, in December 1979. Later they had two children, a son Brandon, born in 1990, and a daughter Aubrey, born in 1992. He called is wife “my sage counsel,” who has advised him throughout his career and together they balanced career and family as they moved around the United States
While an undergraduate student at Pennsylvania State University Shoop’s enrolled in Army ROTC and early training included Air Borne School at Fort Benning. After graduating, he applied to be a Signal Corp officer, and started his military career taking his first job as an electrical engineer dealing with satellite communication. Like many members of the U.S. military, he moved often taking assignments in Georgia, Pennsylvania, California, Virginia, Texas, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Rhode Island, and finally, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Early in his career, Shoop was a satellite communication engineer responsible for the design and installation of a high-capacity, global digital communication network, and also the Chief Technology Officer for an organization addressing the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) challenge worldwide.
Shoop retired as a Brigadier General after a thirty-nine-year career in the U.S. Army, with the last twenty-five years at the United States Military Academy at West Point. At West Point he had key leadership roles, including Director of the Photonics Research Center (June 1995 – July 2000), Directory of the Electrical Engineering Program (June 2003 – June 2007), and Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (June 2014 – January 2019). Other assignments included one year (June 2006 – June 2007) in Washington, D.C. as Science Advisor to the Director and Chief Scientist in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). A few years later, on sabbatical from USMA, he returned to Washington, D.C. as Special Assistant to the Director (Lieutenant General Michael Oates and then Lieutenant General Michael Barbero), Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Joint IED Defeat Organization. (June 2010 – June 2011).
Since leaving West Point, Shoop has been Dean of Engineering at the Albert Nerken School of Engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Engineering in Manhattan, New York. He took this post on 1 January 2019. He leads the largest of The Cooper Union’s schools which is comprised of seven academic departments supporting an average enrollment of roughly 480 undergraduate and another 70 graduate students. Under his leadership, the School of Engineering has introduced four new minors including Computer Science, Bioengineering, Chemistry, and Humanities and Social Sciences; introduced a new type of course structure known as Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) that engage students in a project-based experience over multiple semesters, to apply disciplinary knowledge and gain important professional skills. He has also hired new additional tenure-track faculty, launched additional partnerships, and expanded the summer study abroad program.
An active professional and volunteer, Shoop has been IEEE President (2016), Vice President of Member and Geographic Activities (2010), IEEE Secretary and Corporate Officer (January 2008 – December 2009), and a member of the IEEE Board of Directors. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the Optical Society of America (OSA), the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), and as Chair of SPIE’s Education Committee for two years (2013-2014). He is also the recipient of many awards and honors from IEEE, IEEE-USA, OSA, SPIE, Phi Kappa Phi, and Pennsylvania State University (see his biographical entry for further details).
Shoop has made contributions across the breadth of IEEE that have changed the very fabric of its operations and governance, from local geographic units to the Board of Directors. His strategic vision has allowed him to lead the way to revolutionary changes within IEEE in the way IEEE thinks about, supports, and treats its members. One of Shoop’s most impactful accomplishments was his leadership in 2007-2008 as chair of the Regional Activities Board (RAB) Enterprise Engineering Project Ad Hoc Committee, which transformed RAB into the Member and Geographic Activities (MGA) group. One of the largest IEEE transformations in recent history, this change made the member a priority by focusing on involving members in all IEEE organizational units through programs and activities. As the 2010 vice president of MGA, he developed the Regional Geographic Strategy, which focuses on unique circumstances and commonality of the local geographic region to improve membership value and drive recruitment and retention. As the 2008-2009 IEEE secretary and chair of the IEEE Governance Committee, he led the Committee’s transformation from being focused solely on governing documents to being a resource for making IEEE governance more effective. In 2008, as the chair of the Business Management System Ad Hoc Committee, he made recommendations on how to improve IEEE’s IT system that resulted in changes to the entire IEEE IT enterprise, including structure, governance, and architecture. In addition, while IEEE President-elect and President his volunteer work included the IEEEin2030 Ad Hoc on the proposed optimized Board structure. It aimed to create a nimble, flexible, forward-looking organization which was one of the four strategic outcomes from the 2015 Board retreat. Ultimately, IEEE members did not approve all of these suggestions presented by the IEEEin2023 Ad Hoc Committee.
Shoop’s military experience influenced his decision as IEEE President to design and distribute a Challenge Coin, a practice continued by Karen Bartleson, 2017 IEEE President and James (Jim) Jefferies, 2018 IEEE President.
About the Interview
BARRY SHOOP: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, March 15, 2024, and March 29, 2024
Interview #904 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Barry Shoop, an oral history conducted in 2024 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Barry Shoop
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 15 March 2024 and 29 March 2024
PLACE: Virtual
Early life and Education
Hellrigel:
[0:00:00] Today is March 15, 2024. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel. I’m the Institutional Historian, Archivist, and Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center. [0:00:20] Today I’m with Dr. Barry Shoop. We’re recording his oral history virtually via Webex. He is currently Dean of the [Albert Nerken School of] Engineering at Cooper Union in Manhattan. He’s an IEEE [0:00:40] Life Fellow and he has had a thirty-nine-year career with the U.S. Army and retired as a Brigadier General I believe. Thank you, Dr. Shoop, and welcome. We’ll begin today with a few questions about your early life and education. [0:01:00] If you could please state your full name and the date and place of your birth. You don’t have to give us the exact date. You could give us the year if you feel comfortable.
Shoop:
Sure. My full name is Barry Leroy Shoop. I was born in Fairbanks, Alaska [0:01:20] in 1957.
Hellrigel:
Were you born in Fairbanks, Alaska because your parents were stationed in the Army or are you just an Alaskan?
Shoop:
No, my father was [0:01:40] a truck driver. My mother was a homemaker. My father loved hunting and fishing, so he moved to Alaska and drove truck in Alaska and did a lot of hunting and fishing and I was born there.
Hellrigel:
That’s cool. If you could tell me your father’s name?
Shoop:
[0:02:00] My father’s name was Roy. Roy Shoop.
Hellrigel:
Roy Shoop. Your mother?
Shoop:
Ruth Shoop.
Hellrigel:
She was also an Alaskan or did she and your father marry and move to Alaska?
Shoop:
Yes, they were both originally from [0:02:20] Pennsylvania. They got married in California and lived in California for a number of years. My sister was born in California and after that they decided to move to Alaska.
Hellrigel:
[0:02:40] Your father was a truck driver. Your mother, what was her occupation?
Shoop:
She was a homemaker.
Hellrigel:
Education levels of your parents? High school?
Shoop:
Neither of them graduated from high school.
Hellrigel:
[0:03:00] They came from Pennsylvania coal country?
Shoop:
Yes, anthracite coal country.
Hellrigel:
You have one sister. Any other siblings?
Shoop:
No, one sister. She’s thirteen years older than me. Her name is Fay Ann.
Hellrigel:
Could you spell that, Sir?
Shoop:
[0:03:20] F-A-Y, second word is A-N-N.
Hellrigel:
Thank you. Now. You were growing up in and you were born in Alaska. How would you describe your childhood?
Shoop:
[0:03:40] This is a very long time ago.
Hellrigel:
Well, did you like hunting and doing those kinds of things with your dad?
Shoop:
I did, but we actually moved from Alaska back to Pennsylvania when I was about twelve years old. My father had some health issues. He had several strokes and the [0:04:00] doctors recommended that he get out of the cold weather of Alaska, so they moved back to Pennsylvania. My early years in Alaska were basically through grade school. When we moved back to Pennsylvania I started seventh grade, high school in Pennsylvania. I did, [0:04:20] in my early years, do a lot of hunting and fishing in Pennsylvania. I wasn’t old enough to do it in Alaska.
Hellrigel:
You grew up in Fairbanks for the first twelve years.
Shoop:
Yes. Yes. We lived very close to the University of Alaska which is just on the outskirts of [0:04:40] Fairbanks.
Hellrigel:
For Alaska that’s urban living.
Shoop:
Yes. Well, in those days, urban is relative.
Hellrigel:
Relative.
Shoop:
Exactly. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Yes, because the census department, the U.S. Census, considered urban, this is weird because they probably came up with the definition in [0:05:00] 1880, a place with more than 2,000 people.
Shoop:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes, now, the definition of urban may be a bit different. You moved back to Pennsylvania for health reasons for your dad and then you lived around extended family?
Shoop:
Yes, yes. [0:05:20] I had aunts and uncles in the local area where they moved back to, and cousins.
Hellrigel:
Then you’re in school, what were some of your favorite subjects?
Shoop:
Math was one of my favorite subjects early on. [0:05:40]
Hellrigel:
Any least favorite subjects or annoying subjects?
Shoop:
As I got a little bit older when I was in college, psychology was one of my most annoying subjects. [Chuckling]
Hellrigel:
May I ask why? [Laughing]
Shoop:
Yes. When I went to Penn State [0:06:00] for an undergraduate degree in an engineering program where you have right and wrong answers: math chemistry, physics, you have right and wrong answers. When I would go to my required distribution subjects like psychology [0:06:20] or philosophy, the professor would ask a question and one of the students would answer one way and another student would answer in a totally different way and the professor would say: you’re both right. I was like, that doesn’t make any sense. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Then they asked the question, [0:06:40] how do you feel about something. [Laughing]
Shoop:
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Hellrigel:
When you’re growing up in high school, did you have any hobbies?
Shoop:
Most of the hobbies were hunting and fishing. I got a job. I had a fulltime job. [0:07:00] A night job at a chicken processing factory. Then later I had a full-time night job at a lumber mill. They built [prefabricated] trusses for houses. I would go to school, high school, during the day and I would work [0:07:20] from like 3:30 or 4:00 o’clock until midnight.
Hellrigel:
I don’t know if it’s legal at age fourteen. I know in New Jersey you could get working papers at age fourteen, but you can only work certain hours. This is to help your [0:07:40] family and save for college?
Shoop:
I bought a pickup truck when I was sixteen years old, right after I got my license, so I saved for that. Yes, my family was not particularly well off in terms of finances. [0:08:00] I ended up paying my own way for the first year of college and then I got an ROTC scholarship that paid for the balance of the three years.
Hellrigel:
When you’re in high school you have no time then for sports and clubs, probably.
Shoop:
I did not. [0:08:20] I wasn’t a sports person.
Hellrigel:
Your family, what were their aspirations or expectations of you when you were in high school? Did they expect you to stay in a lumber mill or go to college?
Shoop:
They didn’t really push me or direct me in any particular [0:08:40] direction. My father, when I was in high school, there were basically three tracks in the high school that you could follow. If you knew you were going to go to college, there was a college prep track that you could go to. We lived in a fairly rural [0:09:00] area of Pennsylvania and so there were a lot of farms, so there was an agricultural kind of a track. Then for the third track our high school shared a vocational technical school with a number of other high schools in the local area. When I was [0:09:20] trying to decide what to do, this was in the early to mid-1970s, and if you recall, muscle cars were a big deal back then. I came home one day after they had a presentation at [0:09:40] high school, junior high school about vo-tech. Vo-tech was tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade. So, I sat through that, and I came home and around the dinner table I said I think I’d like to go to vo-tech, and I’d like to study auto mechanics or auto body repair for the [0:10:00] muscle cars. My dad says, you don’t want to study automotive; you want to study electronics, that’s the way of the future. I look back on that and I find myself amazed and puzzled that I went in the next day, and I signed up for the electronics [track] at [0:10:20] vo-tech without any question. That’s really kind of what started me into, ultimately, electrical engineering as I took three years at vo-tech of electronics.
Hellrigel:
What was the name of your high school?
Shoop:
Tri Valley High School.
Hellrigel:
Tri Valley, [0:10:40] is this Western Pennsylvania?
Shoop:
Excuse me, actually Eastern Pennsylvania. It’s sort of halfway between Scranton and Harrisburg along that track.
Hellrigel:
Oh, okay. The Route 81 corridor. [0:11:00]
Shoop:
Exactly. Exactly.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I did a lot of research on the electrification of that neck of the woods.
Shoop:
Ah, okay. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
If I may ask, your sister, what was her career, college?
Shoop:
No, she didn’t go to [0:11:20] college either. Early on, when we lived in Alaska, she loved horses, so she had one or two horses in Alaska. She married in Alaska. By the time we moved back down to Pennsylvania, she was already married. They stayed in Alaska for a number of years. [0:11:40] She was a homemaker as well. Then later, they moved. Her husband, Wayne was originally from Vermont, so they moved back to Vermont. She still lives in Vermont.
Hellrigel:
When you’re growing up did your family [0:12:00] have any traditions, go on vacations, or things of that?
Shoop:
Again, my dad and my sister did a good deal of hunting and fishing in Alaska. The major trips that we took were generally [0:12:20] trips from Alaska back to Pennsylvania to visit family. We would always drive, and we would take different routes. It was a long trip, but we got to see a lot of the United Sates, and some of Canada as well.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Did you stop at national parks and things [0:12:40] like that?
Shoop:
We did. You know the touristy kinds of places, national parks. I remember one year, because my sister was so fond of horses, on the way back we stopped in Canada at Calgary. Calgary has an annual stampede [0:13:00]. They call it the Calgary Stampede and so we stopped there to see the horses.
Hellrigel:
That’s fun. I’ve driven cross country a few times. Always along the Route 80 corridor though. [Laughing]
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
But if you went to Canada, you also took Route 90. [0:13:20] That must have taken you a week to get to Pennsylvania and a week to get home.
Shoop:
Exactly. It was a fairly long kind of vacation and we would stop at [local scenic and tourist areas]. There were probably some interstate highways, but we always took the back roads [0:13:40] to be able to see the countryside and the local areas.
Hellrigel:
That must have been fun.
Shoop:
[Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Did you look forward to this annual adventure?
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Maybe annual or maybe not.
Shoop:
It wasn’t annual. We would do it probably about every two, two to three years.
Hellrigel:
[0:14:00]. Yes, well it is a major time commitment. When you’re growing up then, you’re going to take the electronics route in high school. You had a pickup truck, and I guess you knew how to fix your own truck.
Shoop:
I did. I did a lot of tinkering. It was a four-wheel drive [0:14:20] Ford F-250.
Hellrigel:
Oh, the big American truck.
Shoop:
Big American truck, that’s right. [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
You bought it used?
Shoop:
No, I bought it new.
Hellrigel:
You bought it new?
Shoop:
Yes, from the factory, $6,400, brand new.
Hellrigel:
This was [0:14:40] early 1972?
Shoop:
It was about 1974 or 1975.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
It was a 1975 Ford F-250.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Red?
Shoop:
Blue.
Hellrigel:
Blue. Okay.
Shoop:
Midnight blue. [0:15:00]
Hellrigel:
I had a neighbor that had a red one.
Shoop:
Oh.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Then he got a white one. He loved that truck model.
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] You’re going to high school. Did anybody tell you that you should go off to college as opposed to trade school?
Shoop:
[0:15:20] Yes. I think it was between senior year and junior year, I met Linda who is now my wife. We were considered, I guess, high school sweethearts. I don’t know. She went to North Schuylkill High School which was [0:15:40] more in a rural setting. I’m sorry, an urban setting. But we met at vo-tech. She was a photographer for the yearbook, and she was taking photographs. We met at vo-tech [0:16:00] and we started dating. In senior year, she was planning to go away to college, a two-year college, to get a business degree. We were pretty serious about dating and senior year I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do because she was going away to college. [0:16:20] I had to figure out something to do for two years. One day I was talking to my electronics teacher at vo-tech, John Chowanski, and he said to me, you can make a lot more money with an associate’s degree than you can with a high school degree. [0:16:40] Penn State has a local campus, Schuylkill Campus, which wasn’t terribly far away. So, on his advice I ended up applying to Penn State, to the local campus. I was going to get a two-year associate’s degree. I got in and [0:17:00] Linda was going to go away to college. Then she decided that being away and separated for two years probably wasn’t a good idea, so she decided not to go to college. She decided to stay home [and get a job], and I ended up going to Penn State.
Hellrigel:
You do two years at Schuylkill and transfer [0:17:20] to State College?
Shoop:
Yes, yes. What happened was I got to Schuylkill and during orientation they have all of these things that you can do. The ROTC tent was set up there. They said, yes, come, come join ROTC. There’s no commitment. [0:17:40] You get to rappel out of helicopters. We go on these weekend excursions. It sounded a lot like hunting and fishing to me, so I signed up for it. I took some military history classes and did the ROTC. At the end of the first year, they offered me a three-year scholarship. [0:18:00] That’s how I got into ROTC.
Hellrigel:
Then this helped financially?
Shoop:
It paid for three of the four years for my undergraduate [education], yes.
Hellrigel:
You still get the associate’s [degree] at Schuylkill and then transfer to the main campus? [0:18:20] Did you consider any other college?
Shoop:
No. Penn State had a pretty decent [reputation]. Schuylkill had a pretty decent track record and a kind of a pipeline if you will to main campus. It was the logical thing to do. [0:18:40]
Hellrigel:
She did not go away to college, but did she consider the two-year Schuylkill campus?
Shoop:
No. She got a job.
Hellrigel:
You select Army ROTC. Were there any other [0:19:00] ROTCs at the time there?
Shoop:
No, I don’t believe Schuylkill had Navy or Air Force. I think they only had Army.
Hellrigel:
Now you sign up for this and you have a three-year funding commitment. Then you have a six-year commitment to the U.S. Army?
Shoop:
[0:19:20] I think it was a four-year commitment.
Hellrigel:
A four-year commitment.
Shoop:
I believe it was a four-year commitment.
Hellrigel:
You get the electronics concentration. Then you transfer over to Penn State’s main campus in State College and you’re in the Electrical Engineering Department.
Shoop:
That’s correct, yes.
Hellrigel:
How was the transition from Schuylkill to [0:19:40] State College?
Shoop:
It was a little bit more abrupt. I mean the Schuylkill campus is a commuter campus mostly. They have some dorms, but it was close enough to my home that I could commute. Moving into a very large campus [0:20:00] like Penn State, and into the dorms was a little bit of a shock.
Hellrigel:
Now you’re stuck with a roommate?
Shoop:
Yes. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
How large a program was the Army ROTC at the time at Penn State?
Shoop:
It was huge. [0:20:20] I can’t tell you the total number, but at the main campus they not only had Army, and they had Navy and Air Force as well. It was a very, very large program.
Hellrigel:
At this point, there [0:20:40] is no military draft. I think the draft ended.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I don’t know how to ask this, but how popular was ROTC?
Shoop:
Well, it was.
Hellrigel:
No tension on campus or anything?
Shoop:
No. At that time, [0:21:00] I went to Schuylkill from 1976 to 1978 and then the main campus from 1978 to 1980. I graduated in 1980. No, there were no tensions. All of that was behind us.
Hellrigel:
Okay. [0:21:20] Summertime, you’re training, or do you go back home?
Shoop:
Most of the time, back home. There’s a training camp between junior and senior year during the summer. I spent, I think it was nine weeks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, so it was [0:21:40] summer training to kind of teach you all things basic in terms of the Army. In 1979, I spent that time at Fort Bragg. Then after that, I signed up and I went to Fort Benning, Georgia to [0:22:00] Airborne School, so I learned how to jump out of airplanes that summer as well.
Hellrigel:
Wow. That’s no fear of heights?
Shoop:
Well, it’s kind of odd because I do, [Laughing] but out of an airplane it just seemed to be different. They train you. It’s a three-week program [0:22:20] and by the time you get into the airplane it’s just somewhat mechanical to stand up, hook up, [shuffle] to the door, and jump out.
Hellrigel:
Yes. During World War II, my late uncle was a paratrooper instructor.
Shoop:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
[0:22:40] You’re doing that. Did you enjoy being at the campus, going to classes, and things of that nature?
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Any professors there influential?
Shoop:
None that particularly stand out. [0:23:00] I mean I was already on a track. I knew what I was going to do when I graduated. I was going to go into the Army.
Hellrigel:
When you’re graduating, that must have been a large class, an EE class out of Penn State.
Shoop:
Yes, it was huge. [0:23:20]
Signal Corps, master's degree
Hellrigel:
I guess you don’t have any choice about where you’re going to go after you graduate because you have a commitment with the Army?
Shoop:
Right. I knew I was going to go into the Army. The Army gives you a choice. You get to request certain branches. My [0:23:40] major, electrical engineering, aligned with the Signal Corps [branch] which does communications. I applied to be a Signal Corps officer and was selected to do that. Then the Army basically decides where you go for your first assignment. I ended [0:24:00] up going back to Pennsylvania, surprisingly. Northeastern Pennsylvania, there’s an Army Depot that repaired communications equipment, Tobyhanna Army Depot.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that’s right, yes.
Shoop:
That was my first duty station. I served three years there. [0:24:20] They actually did a lot of repair of equipment, refurbishment of equipment. But they also had a satellite communication prototyping facility. My first job was as an electrical engineer dealing with satellite communications. [0:24:40]
Hellrigel:
That then becomes your career.
Shoop:
That becomes my career. Yes.
Hellrigel:
At this point you get married?
Shoop:
I actually got married in 1979, December of 1979. [0:25:00] You will find most of my career and life are very logical. [Laughing] The reason we got married in December of 1979 was because I was going to graduate in [June of] 1980 and if we were married before we joined the Army, that saved a lot of paperwork. [0:25:20] [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Yes, because then you come in with a wife, and you don’t have to explain the arrival of a wife.
Shoop:
Exactly. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Also, it means that you get married housing?
Shoop:
That’s correct. Yes.
Hellrigel:
That would all be set up, so you don’t have to hassle with negotiating that.
Shoop:
Exactly right. [0:25:40]
Hellrigel:
It’s logical but very serious. I mean you graduate, you have a career, and you have a family now. What did your folks think of this path you’ve selected?
Shoop:
They fully supported it [0:26:00] and encouraged me all the way through it. I mean they were particularly excited. I’m the first in my family to go to college.
Hellrigel:
Were they nervous about you getting shipped off to Europe or anything?
Shoop:
[0:26:20] Not so much. There wasn’t an awful lot going on in the political environment in the world at that time.
Hellrigel:
I noticed that a number of your publications deal with leadership, so you’re not only learning [0:26:40] how to be an engineer, but as an officer then you have that responsibility, too.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How did you find that experience?
Shoop:
I enjoyed it. The Army does a very good job at [0:27:00] training folks. Actually, before going to Tobyhanna, right after graduation, I ended up spending, I want to say, it was three months at Fort Gordon, Georgia which is the home of the Signal Corps. I got trained on Army communications equipment and [0:27:20] leadership; how to be a good Second Lieutenant at the time. Throughout my career there were other points where they would send you off. You were required to go off and get additional training. I want to say all of those kinds of trainings included [0:27:40] some form of leadership. It was just part of the job and part of your life at that point in time.
Hellrigel:
Then how do you plan your path? You’re in Pennsylvania working with the Signal Corps. Then I see from your resume that you also continued to do training, [0:28:00] senior electronic training from 1986 to 1989. You’re diversifying a bit. I think you were in Charlottesville?
Shoop:
I was. So, at the end of Tobyhanna, [0:28:20] I went back to Fort Gordon and to what was called an Advance Course. As a Captain, you go back and get some additional training to teach you how to be a Captain and teach you what the roles are. In that I think I spent three months at Fort Gordon [0:28:40] and then I spent another six or eight months in Biloxi, Mississippi. In Biloxi, that was an Air Force base. That was more expansive communications technologies. Then after that [0:29:00] I was given an opportunity. I could have gotten out of the Army, but the Army then gave me the opportunity and they offered me a master’s degree, so from there I ended up going to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. [0:29:20]
Hellrigel:
Oh, that’s a big change from Biloxi, Mississippi to Monterey, California.
Shoop:
It is. It is. [Laughing] We spent two years in Monterey, California and I got my master’s degree in electrical engineering there. Then after that my next assignment, I was given [0:29:40] a couple of opportunities and Charlottesville, Virginia was the one that I opted for. Charlottesville, at the time it was called the Foreign Science and Technology Center. It wasn’t necessarily Signal Corps, but it was an intelligence organization that [0:30:00] provided intelligence assessment to senior leaders in the government. So, I spent three years in a classified facility there.
Hellrigel:
Oh, wow. At this point then you have to get more advanced clearance.
Shoop:
I had some very high [0:30:20] clearances there. Top Secret Plus.
Hellrigel:
This might be a stupid question but intelligence, so this is trying to intercept signals from satellites and things?
Shoop:
Part of it. Yes, that’s part of it. There’s a number of different ways to collect intelligence. [0:30:40] What you just described was signals intelligence. You can eavesdrop or tap telephone lines or other kinds of things. There’s also human intelligence. People interview other folks. In Charlottesville, that organization was kind of an integration. We also did [0:31:00] just basic analysis of what was being published. At the time, Charlottesville was where I began changing my area of research and disciplinary focus from traditional communications, high speed digital [0:31:20] communications, satellite communications. I got engaged in optics and optical signal processing there. One of the roles that I had was I would read journals and papers from other countries to try to assess [0:31:40] what was the state of the art in a particular country and what could they do with that kind of technology if they applied it to a military setting.
Hellrigel:
Wow. So, literally you kind of spent your day as if you were in a library.
Shoop:
Pretty much. [0:32:00] Pretty much, yes. Then we would fuse that information. I was studying a particular area and my area was using optics and optical signal processing techniques to process data or process images, process [0:32:20] information so we would then fuse that state of the art. It is kind of like reading IEEE journals on a regular basis in a specific area. Then on top of that, we would get human intelligence, we would get signals intelligence, and we would then try to fuse that together to then assess [0:32:40] what’s the state of the art and what could possibly be going on. Then we did a lot of writing. We did a lot of presentations. My writing skills and my presentation skills got particularly good there because I was a Captain at the time, and I was briefing Generals [0:33:00] and fairly high folks in the Pentagon. I had to refine my communication skills there.
Hellrigel:
While this is going on, are you actually reading IEEE journals?
Shoop:
At that time, no [0:33:20] because in the intelligence community, you can’t do that kind of stuff on the U.S.
Hellrigel:
Oh. I thought maybe you were looking at someone that maybe lived in Region 9 or 10 and their publications in IEEE.
Shoop:
No. Most of these journals [0:33:40] had to be translated from a different language.
Hellrigel:
That’s fascinating. I’ve been doing some work with an IEEE member and the history of computers and computer engineering in Russia. At that point, it would have been the Soviet Union. [0:34:00] He said they weren’t allowed to publish.
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Yes, he said they weren’t allowed to publish. They weren’t allowed to meet. They weren’t allowed to talk about it. Then I said, well, then IEEE comes in in the mid-1980s [0:34:20] and it’s like here’s an organization to join.
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
It’s a cultural shift.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Now you can hang out together and maybe talk. But that’s fascinating. As this is going on then you’re [0:34:40] planning out and you’ve committed to a career in the military.
Shoop:
I’ll let that go. I’m sorry. (Talking about a phone call).
Hellrigel:
You were committed to a career in the military, and you were a Captain.
West Point, Ph.D.
Shoop:
Pretty much at that that point, I mean, again, when I got the master’s degree, [0:35:00] I was committed to another four years, I think, after that. Then after Charlottesville is when they offered me the Ph.D.
Hellrigel:
How did they approach that? They just said, hey, we’ve got a next port of call and you could [0:35:00] get your Ph.D.?
Shoop:
Well, yes. In negotiating, the Army has a certain number of slots, fully funded slots for Ph.Ds., for master’s and Ph.Ds. You can apply for that. In the Army, you always had [0:35:40] a branch manager. Somebody that you could talk to about your career and talk to you about what’s going on and what the opportunities are. It was actually West Point that reached out to me for this. [0:36:00] When I got my master’s degree in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate School, we probably had I want to say about eight or ten Army officers there getting their master’s degrees. A number of those were in the electrical engineering program. I seemed to [0:36:20] do pretty well. I seemed to excel there. I ended up tutoring a number of my colleagues, Army colleagues and one of those Army colleagues ended up -- when I went to Charlottesville, he went to West Point. He was a West Point graduate. He went back to West Point. He ended up being [0:36:40] the recruiting officer for the Department of Electrical Engineering at West Point.
It was after about, I want to say it’s two years or so, we stayed in contact, two years at Charlottesville and he called me up. He said, you did really well at Naval Postgraduate School, so would you be interested in a Ph.D.? We have [0:37:00] Ph.D. [positions] here. We’ll send you, fully funded, to a Ph.D. program. Then you would come back to West Point to teach for three years. At that point I said that sounds pretty interesting to me. I had to travel to West Point for a personal interview. [0:37:20] I went there and did the personal interview. They said everything sounds good. They gave me a list of the top ten electrical engineering programs in the nation for Ph.Ds. They said if you can get into one of these, we will send you to get your Ph.D. If you can’t get into any of these, then [0:37:40] all bets are off.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
I ended up spending a good deal of time studying for the GRE. I took the GRE to make sure I could get into the best schools. Ultimately, I got into MIT, I got into Stanford, and I got into Berkeley. I really, [0:38:00] really wanted to go to MIT because, you know in my mind MIT was at the top of the list. My wife is my sage counsel, and she says, we’re going to spend three years at West Point. It’s going to be cold and miserable there for three years. Stanford, we knew California. Stanford is a much more beautiful [0:38:20] place, so I took her advice, and we went to Stanford. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] Not a bad choice.
Shoop:
Not a bad choice. I’m very happy that I did that. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Yes. Probably a lot more outdoorsy things to do for her and you.
Shoop:
[0:38:40] Actually yes. She’s a classically trained soprano.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
She got to sing in the Carmel Bach Festival while we were there. We both sang in the Memorial Church Choir at Stanford. She did a lot of singing and performing. [0:39:00] She got an associate’s’s degree from the Monterey Peninsula College in Theater, so she did a lot of that kind of stuff and continues to do some of that. She’s an alto now, after all these years. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
While married she’s moving with you [0:39:20] and then she chooses to go to college?
Shoop:
Yes. I was in college. I was spending a lot of time studying and working, so she just decided to do that there.
Hellrigel:
Then at this point you’re also raising a family?
Shoop:
Not yet. Our children were born at Stanford. [0:39:40] Years later.
Hellrigel:
It makes it a little less complex for her.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That would be a lot of balls to juggle.
Shoop:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
I imagine as a military wife, she also had events to attend with you. Did you do the dress balls and all the formal things?
Shoop:
We did. [0:40:00] Dining ins and dining outs. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then you must enjoy that enough that you’re going to spend thirty-nine years in the Army. You could have got out after twenty years?
Shoop:
Could have gotten out after twenty. But at that point I was at West Point [0:40:20] and I was teaching. I was doing research. It was a really good assignment. It was a very enjoyable assignment.
Hellrigel:
I want to backtrack to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. At that point, I noticed you were a research assistant. Were you running labs [0:40:40] or…?
Shoop:
Not at the Naval Postgraduate School. I was just a student there.
Hellrigel:
You’re funded.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
It’s not like you had to be an assistant.
Shoop:
Right, yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then you’re going off to Stanford. How do you pick someone to work with? [0:41:00] I notice your advisor was Joseph Goodman. How did you pick a dissertation topic? How do you figure all that out?
Shoop:
It was slightly complicated at the beginning. [0:41:20] I already had my master’s degree, so Stanford had a policy that if I was accepted, once I was accepted, I had to have an advisor before I got there. The graduate admissions officer, I guess, contacted me and said [0:41:40] okay, you’ve been accepted. Now you need to identify or have an advisor that is willing to take you on immediately when you come in. Stanford’s got a very large graduate program. She probably [0:42:00] sent me a list of about sixty or eighty faculty members and what their disciplinary background was. So, I started looking at them. I identified a couple of them. I called one and it wasn’t Goodman, it was John Cioffi.
Hellrigel:
[0:42:20] Oh, yes.
Shoop:
He became fairly famous, too. The advantage I had at this time was I was much older, much more mature than most students. I was obviously very driven because if I didn’t find an advisor, I wouldn’t be going to Stanford. [0:42:40] I reached out to John by telephone. At the time, he was doing mostly digital communications theory, digital communications work, but he had a small focus on fiber optics. I said I notice that you’ve got [0:43:00] one student, a Ph.D. student, doing fiber optic kinds of things. I said I noticed that you’re doing some fiber optics work. I need an advisor. They said I have to have an advisor. He said, no, no, that’s just a bean counting thing. I said, well, will you sign up to be my advisor? [0:43:20] He said sure. When I first got to Stanford, John Cioffi was my advisor. It was a little ironic because we were both about the same age.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]
Shoop:
[Laughing] We would have coffee together and we would talk about all kinds of things. [0:43:40] The next big hurdle at Stanford was the [Ph.D.] qualifying exam. You have to take a qualifying exam. Because I already had my master’s degree, I had to take that qualifying exam in January [of my first year]. I got there in June, took summer [0:44:00] classes, and took fall classes. Then I had to take a qualifying exam. Once I took the qualifying exam and passed it, John and I had a conversation. He says I really don’t do optics kind of work. Why don’t I introduce you to a couple of professors that do? [0:44:20] So, he took me around and introduced me to a number of professors and Joe Goodman was one of them.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
All of the professors that I talked to knew I was on a very strict timeline. The Army gave me three years to finish my Ph.D., no more. [0:44:40] All of the professors; I think I talked to a total of five professors. Four of the five professors told me three [years] was impossible. Some of them said, oh, don’t worry, we can get you an extension. It’ll be fine. Goodman was the only one that said, well, three years is going to be tight. If you work really hard [0:45:00] and you don’t make any mistakes or take any mis-directions, it’s possible. I said, okay, I’ll sign up with you as long as it’s possible. So, I worked for him for three years.
Hellrigel:
Wow. For them, they’re getting a student that they don’t have to fund. That’s a perk.
Shoop:
Exactly. [0:45:20] Exactly.
Hellrigel:
You have funding so you don’t have to… [Crosstalk]
Shoop:
I could pick and choose, right.
Hellrigel:
You’re more mature. I mean you know at this point that they know you’re not going to go out [0:45:40] and find yourself.
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
They know you’re focused so Goodman has faith in you then that you’re going to work hard and that you’ve got the Army on your tail. What happens if you don’t finish in three years? Do they just pull you out and you go where they send you?
Shoop:
Yes, yes, they pulled you out. [0:46:00] Yes.
Hellrigel:
This is intense then.
Shoop:
It was very intense. When I first got there, I got there in the summer. It was the summer of 1989. I was there from 1989 to 1992. I graduated in 1992. I got there in the summer because I wanted to get [0:46:20] classes started. I took three graduate level courses that summer.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
All of those graduate level courses. I’d been out of school for three years. I had been in Charlottesville for three years, so I’d been way from academics. I took three graduate level EE courses; they were all taught by [0:46:40] mostly Ph.D. candidates because faculty take off during the summer. That year Stanford was trying a pilot program where they compressed the summer courses to four weeks. I was taking [0:47:00] three graduate level courses in four weeks and was getting homework assignments, literally, every day or every other day that were due in another day. The midterm exam came after two weeks. The final exam after four weeks. I remember I always talked to my Mom [0:47:20] and Dad on the weekends. I guess it was about two weeks into this, my Mom said, Barry, are you okay? You don’t sound too good. I said, Mom, I think I may have ruined my career because I’m not sure [Laughing] I’m not sure I’m going to make it here. [Laughing] [0:47:40] Fortunately, I did. I didn’t get overly stellar grades, but they were B’s. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]. Well, that’s a lot of work. I know the Ph.D. students, the first time you’re teaching, some try to do everything to the Nth degree because their advisor’s watching. Sometimes [0:48:00] they have a reputation of being even more demanding.
Shoop:
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Hellrigel:
This gives you no time to do much sleeping or eating.
Shoop:
Exactly. Yes. It was a very intense summer, but it all worked out.
Hellrigel:
What did they say to you? You come in and they’re like [0:48:20] three in four weeks, so did they think you were overly ambitious or…?
Shoop:
No, it was a program that they were trying. If any faculty wanted to teach, they didn’t want to teach a six-week or a nine-week kind of a program. They were just trying this out.
Hellrigel:
Right [0:48:40] But that’s intense.
Shoop:
But they didn’t maintain that. They didn’t do that after that. [Laughing] They decided it wasn’t a good idea.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I taught many summer courses in the history of technology, engineering, and science and things like that. [0:49:00] At Stevens Institute of Technology where I used to teach, they had a January term where I taught a history course, a full history course in nine days.
Shoop:
Oh, wow. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
I designed it and I called it Technology and Pop Culture. It was really a survey of the history of technology [0:49:20] from 1860 to 1950.
Shoop:
Wow.
Hellrigel:
I picked kind of cool things for each day, and then I slid in the main content.
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
They would think that, okay, we’re studying the history of the television, but we’re also [0:49:40] studying what America is like from 1930 to 1950.
Shoop:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
It’s how you package it.
Shoop:
Yes, yes. Interesting. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
This was designed for people that needed to catch up if they were going to do the co-op.
Shoop:
Oh, okay.
Hellrigel:
[0:50:00] Yes. I don’t know if they still do it but, yes, nine days. We even met on Saturdays.
Shoop:
Oh, wow. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
It was fun but you knew that you couldn’t do something like the intellectual history of [0:50:20] whatever because everyone would be less than thrilled.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
But four weeks, three graduate courses, that is intense. Since you were going to study with Goodman, then, did that kind of help you pick your dissertation topic because you are going to pick it in his field or how’s that work? [0:50:40]
Shoop:
Yes. It was kind of a negotiation. We would get together weekly and talk about ideas. I took his Fourier Optics course. I took his Statistical Optics Course. I got to know him through the courses and then we met [0:51:00] on a regular basis as we started to kind of shape the dissertation [topic]. Quite frankly, it was a little bit of serendipity. He had gone to a lecture one day, talking about oversampled [0:51:20] analog to digital conversion, oversampled A/D conversion from an electronics perspective. There were a number of professors dealing with pure integrated circuits designing techniques. In the audio business when CDs [0:51:40] were first coming out, a way to get very high-resolution audio signals was to use a very rudimentary A/D converter. A 1-bit A/D converter. If you oversampled it, [0:52:00] at something that was much, much higher than the Nyquist rate, you could actually use some signal processing techniques to shape the noise spectrum and you could actually get 8 bits or 12 bits of resolution in an A/D converter by using a 1-bit A/D converter with this [0:52:20] feedback. He had gone to this lecture. They basically made the comment that you’re trading bandwidth for resolution. That kind of prompted him to say optics has a lot of bandwidth so maybe there’s a way that we can use that [0:52:40] technique, it’s in the integrated circuit, the CMOS kind of area, maybe there’s a way that we can apply that in the optics field and get a higher resolution. That’s what started me researching these ideas. I learned what the electronics was all about and then figured out ways [0:53:00] that we could use optical devices to do the feedback and the noise shaping. My dissertation ended up being oversampled optical A/D conversion.
Hellrigel:
At this point, does that Army want to [0:53:20] shift their influence and what you’re going to do for a dissertation?
Shoop:
No. They were very open and very free with it. When I interviewed at West Point, there were two positions that I could have been put into. One was a straight teaching [0:53:40] position. I would do whatever I wanted there. The other was in a research center. They had a photonics research center there and given my interest from my days in Charlottesville, I opted to take that choice so I would teach, but I would [0:54:00] also be doing research in that research center. I was necessarily focused by West Point to focus on something that was optics or in it. But the Army, beyond that, there were no requirements. I wasn’t influenced. West Point didn’t want to come back and review [0:54:20] what my dissertation was to make sure it aligned with what they wanted. I was free to choose whatever I wanted.
Hellrigel:
At this point, there’s also a lot of pressure on you to do this in three years, but also you had a job waiting for you.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That takes a little bit of the [0:54:40] stress of where I’m going to find a job off of you.
Shoop:
Sure.
Hellrigel:
But it also meant another move would be impending.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How did you like… I don’t know if it’s a proper way of asking. How did you like all the moving?
Shoop:
We got used to it. [0:55:00] It was just something that was part and parcel to the job. We knew that we were going to move, depending on where we were and what the assignment was. Charlottesville was three years. Tobyhanna was three years. Monterey was two years. The assignment [0:55:20] to Fort Gordon, Georgia and Biloxi was roughly one year. As we got older and older, we bought a house here in New York about two years ago because we got tired of moving. We were renting and the [0:55:40] –the landlord wanted to increase the rent and we were going to have to move again, and I said I’m getting a little bit tired of moving at our age. [After our most recent move, we have moved a total of twenty-two times.] For the most part the Army does the move for you. Yes, it’s an inconvenience but they [0:56:00] hire movers and shippers to come in and box everything up, put them on the trucks and take them. You then just have to unbox them and put all of your stuff back together again.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you’re working on the dissertation and [0:56:20] is it a mad dash to the finish line or were you feeling comfortable?
Shoop:
It was a mad dash. The other good thing about being in the Army and going through that is the discipline that the Army instills [0:56:40] in you. We had my son, [Brandon] in 1990, so after a year [at Stanford]. It did give me some flexibility that I could help out at home, do those kinds of things. But I kept a fairly rigid schedule that I was always [0:57:00] in the office. I was always working, just to make sure, because three years is not a lot of time to finish a Ph.D.
Hellrigel:
Yes, in a history doctoral program, most definitely would have said you were nuts. It takes longer than three years, but history is a different discipline. [Laughing]
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Yes. You are doing this work. [0:57:20] Did you enjoy it? I mean you have got a lot of pressure on you.
Shoop:
Once I finished my coursework and I was fully focused on the dissertation, I actually loved it. It was a freedom to explore different [0:57:40] avenues of this particular field. It was very invigorating. I enjoyed it a lot.
Hellrigel:
Is there any pressure on you to give papers and act professionally?
Shoop:
Goodman wasn’t as hard [0:58:00] as some professors. The thing that I found afterward was that Goodman, at the time I was there, was actually the EE Department Chair. But he was a full professor. He had already made his claim to fame. He had published the book on Fourier Optics. [0:58:20] He had done all that kind of stuff. He wasn’t focused but he recommended that we publish. I did go to conferences. We did publish a couple of papers. What I realized after that, maybe while I was there, [0:58:40] is that more junior professors, the assistant professors that maybe didn’t yet have tenure, they were the ones that were driving their Ph.D. students, their graduate students to really, really publish. I think it was partly to ensure that they got their name out there in publications [0:59:00] so that they could get tenure. Goodman was a gentleman’s gentleman, I never heard him talk about anybody ill. He was very even keeled. I never heard him raise his voice or anything where some other professors [0:59:20] did.
Hellrigel:
Did the department get along? I’ve been in some departments, because I taught for thirty-two years, where actually it wasn’t very collegial. What was the environment at Stanford for you?
Shoop:
My sense of the environment was it was very collegial. [0:59:40]
Hellrigel:
Good.
Shoop:
Yes, yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
You weren’t being turned off to academia.
Shoop:
No. Not at all. Not at all.
Hellrigel:
You are going to finish this research. This is really cutting edge at that time. Personally, you’re also making [1:00:00] the transition from word processor to writing on computers? I don’t know, I think I got my first personal computer in 1994. I know that science people were a little earlier. But you’re also in college and [1:00:20] in university when the technology that’s used by academics is changing a bit.
Shoop:
Mm-hmm.
Hellrigel:
At this point are you crossing paths with IEEE?
Shoop:
I was an IEEE member from my time at Penn State. [1:00:40] I had a controls class. I forget what the professor’s name was. But I had a controls class and one day he came into class, and he says you’re all going to be electrical engineers and your professional society is IEEE, so you should sign up [1:01:00] to be an IEEE member. And like the advice from my Dad and my wife, I diligently signed up to be an IEEE member. I was an IEEE member throughout my entire career, but I wasn’t really actively engaged in it. I got Spectrum, but I didn’t [1:01:20] really have any Society affiliations at that time or anything. It wasn’t until I got to West Point, right after I got to West Point, is when I really became active in IEEE.
West Point, faculty
Hellrigel:
Then we’ll focus on [1:01:40] IEEE more in Part 2. But now we’re going to make the jump to West Point which must have been exciting, as a military person, to now be on the faculty of West Point.
Shoop:
It was. West Point, [1:02:00] being amongst all of the military there, almost all of the military there were in academics and many of them had master’s degrees and Ph.Ds. West Point has a military side to it, and a leadership side to it as well. But on the academic side, [1:02:20] many of our neighbors that we engaged with were either in our department or in other academic departments having Ph.Ds. It was a very kind of a rich academic and an intellectual environment. Then I was in this research center, [1:02:40] in the Photonics Research Center, able to continue to do research in optics and photonics. West Point was the first engineering school in the nation. So that heritage: [1:03:00] the mission statement of the institution is to educate, train and inspire leaders of character for our country. That kind of a mission statement is something that just inspires you.
Hellrigel:
You’re [1:03:20] at the Photonics Research Center and I guess is this mostly bringing you back to satellites and things of that nature?
Shoop:
No. No. I was continuing to do the work that I did at Stanford in my Ph.D. I wasn’t doing communications. I was teaching [1:03:40] a photonics engineering course. I taught some other traditional EE courses. I taught Signals and Systems. I taught Electromagnetic Fields and Waves. In my research, I started off in the A/D conversion business. I quickly realized that [1:04:00] undergraduates were not at a level that they could do really advanced kinds of things, so I had to pivot a little bit in terms of my research. I got into image processing which I could engage undergraduate [1:04:20] students and faculty that maybe had master’s degrees. That’s mostly what I did.
Hellrigel:
In image processing, there are different types of it. Well, we’ve got medical image processing, what kind of images are they?
Shoop:
[1:04:40] The image processing that I did, the research that I did, was basically an extension of this idea of oversampled A/D conversion. Again, if you can sample at a higher rate and then you do some signal processing on it [1:05:00] with a feedback system, you can get high resolution. That can also be applied to images. The early, early days of images was if you think about the first Xerox machines. The very first Xerox machines, if you took a high resolution [1:05:20] picture or an image and you put it on a Xerox [copy] machine, the Xerox machine had an algorithm, a technique called Digital Image Halftoning. That halftoning was an algorithm that then took [1:05:40] the various gray scales in that high resolution picture and printed [using] only a black or a white dot. In the early days, it was how those black and white dots were arranged spatially that gave you the [1:06:00] perception of the original high-resolution photograph. That was the early days. My research was to extend that. We extended that and we improved the resolution using this technique for oversampled A/D [1:06:20] conversion. It was a feedback system. It turned out to be a neural network. The neural network then optimized the spatial distribution of those black and white pixels. Then later we extended that to color. Then you have red, green, and blue. [1:06:40] You did that and then overlaid them so that’s what the research was.
Hellrigel:
How did you like teaching? This will be the first time that you’re teaching fulltime.
Shoop:
I loved teaching. It was incredible. [1:07:00] Again like my Ph.D., it was incredibly invigorating. The students were exceptional students. It was a great experience. That’s what kept me a West Point as long as I was there.
Hellrigel:
You were there twenty-five years. Is that atypical to stay that long? [1:07:20]
Shoop:
Well, it depends on your career path. West Point has rotating faculty. When I went there, I went there into a rotating faculty position. That meant I would get a master’s or a Ph.D., I would go there for three years and teach and then I would go back out into the Army. [1:07:40] West Point has a small cadre of something similar to tenure. If you are selected as an Academy Professor, which was the title, an Academy Professor can stay at West Point through [1:08:00] [the remainder of] their career. In the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science we probably had about sixty-five faculty and of those sixty-five faculty we probably had about eight Academy Professors. I served the first three years [1:08:20] in a rotating position. I requested a one-year extension. At the end of that one-year extension I was selected as an Academy Professor which then meant that I could stay until the end of my career. As long as I got promoted. At the time I was a Lieutenant Colonel. [1:08:40] As a Lieutenant Colonel I could have stayed until twenty-eight years [of service]. If I got promoted to Colonel, I could stay to thirty years, so I was on a continuous path. Then in 2007, I was selected as the Deputy Department Head and that’s another [1:09:00] special category at West Point. They’re called Professors USMA, Professors United States Military Academy. There are, I want to say, there’s twenty-six total Professors USMA. They’re Deputy Department Heads and [1:09:20] Department Heads. In those categories you can stay until forty years in the Army.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Shoop:
I was selected in 2007 to be the Deputy Department Head of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Hellrigel:
Okay, because I was curious about why [1:09:40] you shifted from the Director of Photonics Research Center, then becoming the Director of Electrical Engineering Program. You left the lab, so these are career moves.
Shoop:
They are. They are. The Photonics Research Center was [1:10:00] an interdisciplinary center. It was between Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry. We had all of those. I started as a researcher in the Photonics Research Center and then later became the Director of the Center. Then a logical progression is, if I wanted to move [1:10:20] in the direction of becoming a Professor USMA, was to get more directly engaged in the educational curriculum and the educational program. Moving into the Director of the Electrical Engineering Program was the logical upward mobility.
Hellrigel:
Who’s advising you? [1:10:40]
Shoop:
The Department Head. Other mentors there, yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you ever have any regrets that you didn’t become a paratrooper and go off to Germany or…?
Shoop:
No. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Okay. Okay. You’re doing [1:11:00] this. I don’t know if this is a stupid statement on my behalf, but you have the pressure of faculty and you also have the pressure of continuing a military career. How do you balance it? At West Point, the assignments they give you, do they help you blend that?
Deployment to Afghanistan, Washington and policy
Shoop:
It is. [1:11:20] I’ve always looked back, and I always thought it was a little bit unfair to a certain degree because I was expected to be an expert in my discipline [which included my technical discipline and as an educator, educational pedagogy]. I was also expected to be an expert in the Army. If you were to look… So, while [1:11:40] I was at West Point I deployed to Afghanistan for a period of time.
Hellrigel:
Ooo. That’s right.
Shoop:
Yes. That was after the Taliban fell. We were helping [1:12:00] the Afghan government create a military academy similar to West Point, so I spent time there. While I was at West Point, I was deployed effectively to be the Chief Technology Officer of an organization in D.C. [1:12:20] called JIEDDO. It was the Joint IED Defeat Organization. They had just stood that up. IEDs were the roadside bombs. I was pulled out of West Point to do that for a year. In that role, I spent time in Iraq, Afghanistan and [1:12:40] quite a number of other places in the world. I got some real-world Army experience while being an academic at West Point.
Hellrigel:
I guess then you got [1:13:00] to pursue the academic career and be the pointy headed academic but you also have to keep up with… I remember the IEDs and all of that pressure and then you’re shipped off to Iraq and Afghanistan and your family stays stateside. [1:13:20]
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re over there, what, three, six months or?
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then that’s a whole new living experience, too. I know you can’t comment on it, but you know for a while you’re living in tents or whatever versus officers housing.
Shoop:
Yes. [1:13:40]
Hellrigel:
That’s a different experience than most academics.
Shoop:
Absolutely. Yes. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
That’s a lot of balls to juggle, too. At any point could they have said to you, okay, we don’t really need [1:14:00] you at West Point, you’re really good at this IED stuff, we want you to permanently move somewhere else?
Shoop:
Well, that’s actually how I got the job at the IED organization. I didn’t go looking for any of this.
Just as a kind of a vignette. [1:14:20] It was the end of the semester [in 2006], and I was the Electrical Engineering Program Director, and I was teaching Engineering Math in the Math Department. I was sitting in my office. I got to my office about 5:30, 6:00 o’clock in the morning. I was [1:14:40] writing my final exam for that course. The first person that comes into my office at about, I want to say, 6:30, is the Department Executive Officer. The Executive Officer was a Captain. I was a Colonel. He comes into my office, and he says, Sir, [1:15:00] do you know a General Meigs? I said no; never heard of him. He says, have you applied for any kind of a job in a new organization in D.C.? I said no. No, don’t know what you’re talking about. He says, okay, thank you. [1:15:20] He leaves at 6:30. About quarter to 7:00, maybe it was 7:00 o’clock, the Department Deputy Head comes into my office. He says the Dean has said that there’s a request [1:15:40] for you by name to go to this new organization. Do you know anything about this? I said I don’t know what you’re talking about. None of this sounds familiar. He says, okay, fine. He leaves. About 7:30, the Department Head comes into my office. He says, Barry, [1:16:00] the Superintendent, who is a three-star [General] at West Point, the Superintendent called and said that there is a by name request for you to go to this new organization to be the Chief Scientist of this organization. I don’t know what’s going on. I said to him, [1:16:20] I said, Sir, I really don’t know. I’ve never heard anything about this. This was about 7:30, and at 8:00 o’clock I get a call from the Superintendent, the three-star. He says Barry, General Montgomery Meigs has requested you by name to report to be the Chief Scientist for [1:16:40] this new organization JIEDDO. There’s nothing I can do about it.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
That was 8:00 o’clock. By 8:30, I had orders on my desk assigning me to this [organization] with worldwide deployment. I called my wife and I said I’ve got some good news and some bad news. She says okay. [1:17:00] She’s been an Army wife for quite a number of years, and she says give me the bad news first. I said I’m being deployed. She says, wow, what’s the good news? I said I think it’s to Washington. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]
Shoop:
We were stationed in an organization in [1:17:20] Crystal City, so it wasn’t in the Pentagon. It was a separate organization. It was a brand-new organization and Montgomery Meigs was a four-star that had been recalled by [Donald] Rumsfeld [the Secretary of Defense] to [serve as the Director]. He told me [1:17:40] the story about two or three months after I was there. He was looking for a chief scientist and he was interviewing some pretty phenomenal faculty members from universities. One of those faculty members was Richard Osgood at Columbia. Rich was an [1:18:00] optics guy. He was part of an external review team of the Photonics Research Center when I was the Director. Meigs interviewed Osgood and said I’d like you to be my science advisor. Osgood said I’ve got Ph.D. students [and grants]. He says you’re not going to find [1:18:20] any civilian academic that’s going to do this, take a year off, but you really ought to look at this guy at West Point by the name of Barry Shoop.
Hellrigel:
You went to the top of the list.
Shoop:
He threw me under the bus. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Are you still friends with Dr. Osgood? [Laughing]
Shoop:
We are. He passed away this past year. [1:18:40]
Hellrigel:
Oh, sorry.
Shoop:
We became very good friends. I actually engaged him when I was the Chief Scientist at JIEDDO. He served on a couple of my panel discussions and some of the workshops and taskforces that we did.
Hellrigel:
Meigs is, M-E-G-G-S? [1:19:00]
Shoop:
M-E-I-G-S.
Hellrigel:
M-E-I-G-S. This is a heady time that this is all going on. I mean it’s a decade past 9/1,1 but it’s still a lot of [1:19:20] government focus.
Shoop:
It was. I mean JIEDDO was a very powerful organization. It was the most intense period in my life, but it was also the most rewarding. The [1:19:40] beginning of the fiscal year when I got there, the budget was $3.4 billion and the next fiscal year it was $4.3 billion. We had a tremendous amount of money. We had Congressional oversight and impact. I got to write policy [1:20:00] that was signed by the Secretary of Defense that influenced the entire defense sector. We were about savings lives.
Hellrigel:
At this point, yes, this is the Chief Technology Officer with the Improvised Explosive Device Challenge work worldwide.
Shoop:
Yes. [1:20:20]
Hellrigel:
How did it feel to have this responsibility because in the media, we see the images of troops moving in tanks, jeeps that are getting blown up. [1:20:40] That’s a lot of pressure on you.
Shoop:
It was tremendous. Meigs had a morning meeting. Every morning he had a standup meeting at 6:00 a.m. Five principals, and I was one of those.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
Every morning we would go into his office and the first thing we would get [1:21:00] was we would get an intel assessment and an intel update of what transpired the previous day in terms of casualties, in terms of those kinds of things. It was something that kept us focused. The year that I was there, I worked, [1:21:20] probably every day was a fourteen, sixteen, eighteen-hour day because of the intensity and because we knew that if we didn’t get it right…
Hellrigel:
Loss of lives.
Shoop:
Folks would die. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Your family moves to D.C. with you for the year?
Shoop:
No. [1:21:40] They stayed at West Point. They stayed in a decent environment. I lived in a hotel in the area. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Crystal City, so you’re on the Yellow and the Blue Line [of the Washigton, D.C. Metro].
Shoop:
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]
Shoop:
Close enough to the airport. I did a lot of traveling that year. As I said, I spent some time in Iraq and [1:22:00] Afghanistan, but I also spent time in South Africa, I spent time in Israel, I spent time in all of these places, and Ireland. All of these places had relationships with terrorist organizations, so we would visit [to assess] their military technology. [1:22:20] Some of the things that we were able to bring to bear for the U.S. Army and the U.S. military came from South Africa, from mine-clearing kinds of things. The V-shaped hulls on the vehicles came from South Africa. We got a lot of [1:22:40] technology information from the Israelis in terms of their challenge. It was a lot of travel.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing all this travel, you’re near Reagan Airport, that was National Airport at that time. You’re flying domestic or [1:23:00] commercial or did they put you on military flights and ship you around?
Shoop:
Most of it was commercial. If I went to Israel or Ireland or other places, South Africa, those were all civilian aircraft. When we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, we would change [1:23:20] and take military into those areas.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing policy and consulting and doing that is another new venue for you.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Dealing with politicians and?
Shoop:
I testified before Congress. I don’t ever want to do that again. [1:23:40] [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
Yes. I was with Meigs when we went to see the SecDef, the Secretary of Defense and the chiefs, so yes, I got exposed to some very high-level politicians, leaders, others.
Hellrigel:
[1:24:00] This is George W. Bush.
Shoop:
Correct.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Well, teaching U.S. History, I joke it’s George the Second, after his father George H.W. Bush.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That’s also a whole new world of people, experiences, and activities.
Shoop:
It is, it is. But again, you know those kinds of things, [1:24:20] it was the most intense period of my life. But when I look back on it, we actually made a difference. Some of the technologies that we were able to develop made a difference.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Some of my undergraduate students [1:24:40] were in Afghanistan. For a while I taught at two-year schools and so when they would cycle out of the military, I had a few. Yes. I’m sure they would like to shake your hand because they talked about that: the improvements to the vehicles. Now [1:25:00] how come you only stay for one year?
Shoop:
That’s all I could take. [Laughing] It was a one-year assignment. Meigs would have liked me to stay longer, but I was just tired. I was burned out. I mean that long, even though I was mostly in D.C. [1:25:20] with all of this travel, I only saw my family twice in that year.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Then you had a choice? Could they have said, no, you’re not leaving, you’re staying?
Shoop:
They could have. They could have.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Is this [1:25:40] common for professors at West Point to be pulled back into the military here and there?
Shoop:
Not so much. We went through a period, close to this, where the Superintendent and the Chief of Staff of the Army [1:26:00] decided that they wanted to re-green the [permanent] officers that were at West Point. So, we went through a period, I want to say it was about six or eight years, where officers would deploy some place for a period of [1:26:20] three months to six months to a year. It was going back to kind of an operational unit. One of my deployments, I spent the summer, I spent three months in Vincenza, Italy working for U.S. Army [1:26:40] Africa. Vincenza was supporting AFRICOM. It was a job of mostly policy trying to help support the units that were in Africa and others. Others went back to units. [1:27:00] There’s not a lot of need for Ph.Ds. in the regular force. Most of the Ph.Ds. that were rotating and doing this were either Academy Professors or Professors USMA, so they were Ph.Ds. and generally [1:27:20] Colonels. If you try to send a Colonel from West Point to a brigade, a Brigade Commander is a Colonel, so you end up with an extra Colonel and nobody knows what to do with them. They tried that for a period of time and then ultimately decided that wasn’t really working as effectively. Then the Chief of Staff of the Army [1:27:40] rotated out and they got a new Chief of Staff in that said this doesn’t make any sense.
Hellrigel:
One question. I noticed from your resume that 2001-2002, you were working on a master’s and you’re up at the U.S. Naval College [1:28:00], you’re a Fellow? How did you get into that? That was security research?
Shoop:
That was another one of those kind of Army [or] DOD schools. Within the Army, within my career path, if you were to go back and look, right after I graduated from Penn State [1:28:20] I went to the Officer Basic Course, Fort Gordon. After my first three years, I went back to Fort Gordon for the Officer Advanced Course. That’s Captain’s training. Between Stanford and West Point, I spent a year at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Fort Leavenworth is the Command and General Staff [1:28:40] College. Officers go there as Majors to learn how to be a major-level staff officer. The next one is the Army or a War College and that’s when you’re a Lieutenant Colonel on track to become a Colonel. I had the opportunity of either going to [1:29:00] Carlisle, Pennsylvania which is the Army War College or going to the U.S. Naval War College, which was at Newport, Rhode Island, so my family and I opted to go to Rhode Island.
Hellrigel:
Rhode Island.
Shoop:
Yes, Rhode Island. It’s all about location.
Hellrigel:
[1:29:20] Well, yes, it’s the beach versus inland.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Middle of the country.
Shoop:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
Newport’s an experience.
Shoop:
Beautiful. Yes. Yes, it is. Yes, I spent a year there at the Naval War College. I got a master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies.
Hellrigel:
[1:29:40] Were you able to select what you would study there going in?
Shoop:
It was a structured program. There were a couple of electives in there that you could choose, but they had a core curriculum that everybody went through.
Hellrigel:
At this point your family is you, your wife, and one son.
Shoop:
Son and daughter. [1:30:00] My son, [Brandon] was born in 1990 at Stanford and my daughter, [Aubrey,] was born the day after I graduated Stanford in 1992.
Hellrigel:
Oh, wow. Talk about sneaking things into the deadline. [Laughing]
Shoop:
Exactly. Exactly. I was able to go into the [operating] room. [1:30:20] My wife had a C-section. I was able to go into the room, go up to her, and say good morning Mrs. Shoop, I’m Dr. Shoop and I’ll be doing the delivery today. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] It’s just what everyone wants, a joke while they’re delivering a baby. [1:30:40] [Laughing]
Shoop:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
A side question, did your folks come to any of your graduations?
Shoop:
No. They were not able to.
Hellrigel:
Now you’re going back and you’re [1:31:00] changing up a little bit at West Point. You’re going to become the Department Deputy Head and things like that, so you’re segueing over into the Academy Professorship track.
Shoop:
To the [1:31:20] Professor USMA track. So, I was an Academy Professor up through and then segued between Academy Professor and Deputy Department Head is the selection as a Professor USMA.
Hellrigel:
That happens when you come back from D.C., that transition, sort of. [1:31:40]
Shoop:
Yes. I freely admit that the job in D.C. helped my packet, my resume. The other thing about Professor USMA is it’s a Presidential [nomination] with Congressional [1:32:00] [confirmation].
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Shoop:
It’s kind of a big deal.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Do they have it similarly at the other military academies?
Shoop:
They do.
West Point, Head of Department, ABET and engineering education
Hellrigel:
That’s pretty cool. How did you like your [1:32:20] Head of Department of what, eighty to one hundred faculty. Most of the West Point students are engineers? Do they have other tracks these days?
Shoop:
They have other tracks. Right now, there are thirteen academic departments at West Point. [1:32:40] All of the cadets that go through -- I mean a cadet can get a philosophy degree; they can get a French degree. They can get other kinds of degrees. But the one common theme is that all cadets, if you’re not in an engineering discipline, the other disciplines [1:33:00] have to take a three-course engineering sequence because the military believes, and I believe that there’s a logical connection between logical decision-making and the engineering thought process. Yes.
Hellrigel:
[1:33:20] Now how’s life different? You’re a Professor and Deputy Department [Head] and then you become Head of the Department. How do you like all that? I don’t know, bureaucracy isn’t the right term but academic management.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That’s new.
Shoop:
It is a little [1:33:40] bit. As the Director of the Electrical Engineering Program, I oversaw all faculty in the EE program so at that point I was kind of like a Department Chair. [In the Department of EECS] we had three programs. We had Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Information Technology majors. So, it was a lot of management. I will tell you that it’s easier at a place like West Point than it is at a regular academic institution.
Hellrigel:
You get less sass.
Shoop:
Yes. Exactly.
Both:
[Laughter]
Hellrigel:
Because [1:34:20] I mean you have the three-year rotating appointments. I know Mary Lanzerotti had one of those teaching positions and she’s a civilian. But most of the professors are military?
Shoop:
Most of them are military. When I got there [in 1993], there were very few civilians. [1:34:40] Right now, probably at about 30 percent civilians. Maybe a little bit higher. There was a need and a desire to -- many years ago, it was only military. Periodically you would have maybe a visiting professor that was a civilian. But it was [1:35:00] predominantly military. Part of that was by design. The junior officers, the junior rotating officers are generally Captains or Majors. When the cadets graduate, they’re going to be Second Lieutenants. Their Company Commander is going to be a Captain. That affiliation [1:35:20] and that familiarity is kind of important. Then later, they recognized that the military, regardless of what rank you are, the military always serves and reports to a civilian leadership, political or otherwise.
Hellrigel:
Right. [1:35:40]
Shoop:
Then there was a move to inject more civilians into it. Quite frankly it bolstered the continuity. If we only had six or eight Academy Professors in the department, those six or eight Academy Professors were the [1:36:00] historical continuity of the department. If you now had civilians that stay longer, now you have more continuity in the department. That was an additional benefit to it.
Hellrigel:
So, less sass back. You have more continuity. [1:36:20] You become more active in Engineering Education, maybe?
Shoop:
I did. That was logical, for me, it was a logical progression. Again, after the Ph.D., when I was in the Photonics Research Center, I was very focused [1:36:40] on research and publications and doing those kinds of things. But then as I moved up in terms of leadership and administration, I had less time to do that hands-on research. I actually took a sabbatical as the Deputy Department Head and I [1:37:00] I was going to try to get back into research. I stayed at West Point, but I was going to do research in the Photonics Research Center. At the end of the first semester, I realized that I had been away from that for long enough that it just wasn’t going to come back easily. [1:37:20] That’s when I began transitioning. I created a new course on innovation because when I was at JIEDDO I was basically at the leading edge of innovation for IED defeat kinds of things. I created a new [1:37:40] course on innovation that upper class students took. I spent some time working on the pedagogy, doing the analysis of the teaching work. That’s kind of how I transitioned from kind of hard core [1:38:00] research to more educational pedagogy and innovation. I still teach a similar innovation course at Cooper.
Hellrigel:
Innovation is a hot topic.
Shoop:
It is.
Hellrigel:
It also bridges you between academia [1:38:20] and industry.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Then it puts you in with the ABET crew.
Shoop:
I got involved with ABET. My professional society engagement kind of across the board really began [1:38:40] when I got to West Point. If you were to look back, like you said, in the next session, we’ll talk about IEEE, but I started at the local Section of IEEE. My professional society, since I was kind of an electrical engineer, but I was doing optics and photonics, was IEEE and the Photonics Society. It was [1:39:00] the Optical Society of America, and SPIE [Society for International Optics and Photonics], and then I did a little bit of work with each of those in terms of volunteer leadership. But then ABET actually spawned from my engagement with SPIE.
At West Point all of the [1:39:20] engineering programs are ABET accredited and so we have familiarity with ABET. When I was working with SPIE, I was on the Education Committee of SPIE. SPIE had a desire to potentially launch an [1:39:40] accreditation for an optical engineering program, and they had to have ABET to do that.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Shoop:
I became the SPIE representative on the ABET Board of Directors as we were building that particular program. I served on the IEEE Board of Directors. I served on the SPIE [1:40:00] Board of Directors, the OSA Board of Directors and ABET Board of Directors. That was another very fortunate thing that West Point encouraged that kind of stuff. If you were in a regular Army unit you wouldn’t be able to do those kinds of things. But at West Point it was [1:40:20] viewed as professional society or professional service.
Hellrigel:
Then we’ll pick up with IEEE. But that helps explain why your last appointment, smack in the middle of it, you get release time from West Point [1:40:40] to be IEEE President.
Shoop:
I was very incredibly fortunate. Again, this required the Dean who was a one-star and the Superintendent who’s a three-star, it required their permission because I was gone as the IEEE President for [1:41:00] an incredible number of days during that year [Laughing]. [Two-hundred-and-ninety-six days of travel in 2016 and twenty-one countries.]
Hellrigel:
Also, we wouldn’t know that the COVID or cooties epidemic was down the road. But you’ll be the past president in 2017 and doing some travel, maybe 2018. Then [1:41:20] life changes and you’re going to segue to Cooper Union at that point. But I know there’s a lot of traveling when you’re the Three Ps [IEEE President-Elect, President, and Past President].
Shoop:
Yes.
Cooper Union
Hellrigel:
Yes, we’ll pick up. I don’t know [1:41:40] if you wanted to (do it) today if you want to make the jump to your next professional -- how do you decide to leave the military and go to Cooper Union? Do you want to leave that for the next time?
Shoop:
I can start that now, [1:42:00] but I do have a hard stop at 11:00.
Hellrigel:
Sure.
Shoop:
Again, it’s a natural occurrence or a natural selection. I could only have stayed at West Point until my fortieth-year of service. [1:42:20] There is a maximum amount. As you know I retired close to my thirty-ninth year [as a Brigadier General]. I talked to a number of folks. The previous Department Head that had retired and I talked to a [1:42:40] number of other mentors and they said you should really start looking. The recommendation from most was to start looking for a job about a year out. A couple of other ones, my previous Department Head, suggested that it be more than that [1:43:00] because finding a job, finding the right job, finding the right transition takes some time. Then others that I talked to suggested that the closer to my IEEE Presidency that would be viewed by employers as, [1:43:20] a positive. So, I started looking. When I started looking my first inclination was, I was going to try to look at industry because I had been in academia [1:43:40] for twenty-five years. I had done [all] the kinds of things [that academia valued].
I was a Fellow of three professional societies. I had done all of that. I was just intrigued by industry. So, the first industry that I interviewed with, the first one was [1:44:00] GlobalFoundries, which is an integrated circuit manufacturer. Its home is in Upstate New York, north of Albany. They own a lot of chip manufacturing [plants] around the world. I was interviewing for the Chief Technology Officer [1:44:20] position for GlobalFoundries. About the same time, I was recruited by Cooper Union for the Dean [of Engineering]. I ended up interviewing for both of those positions within about two or three weeks of each other. [1:44:40] The reason that I was intrigued by Cooper Union is, if you’re in engineering education, you know that there’s about three or four premier undergraduate engineering institutions.
There’s Cooper Union. There’s Rose-Hulman. There’s Harvey Mudd. There’s Olin College. But at the undergraduate level [1:45:00] those are always the top four or five so I was intrigued by that. Quite frankly I didn’t know it was in Manhattan. I didn’t know where it was, but I knew the reputation. As I was interviewing with GlobalFoundries and Cooper Union, I quickly realized that [1:45:20] the industry track was just about the money. It was what can Barry Shoop do for us to make us more money. That was the bottom line. Cooper Union has an incredibly rich history. [1:45:40] It’s similar to West Point. [It was founded in] 1859 by Peter Cooper. When I looked at the mission statement of Cooper Union and I read a little bit about Peter Cooper, it drew me back to the West Point mission statement.
Hellrigel:
It clicked. [1:46:00]
Shoop:
Yes. It’s something that I could get up on a daily basis and know I’m making a difference.
Shoop:
Something bigger than myself. That’s what drew me to Cooper.
Hellrigel:
I guess if headhunters are looking for you, the word is out that you’re transitioning.
Shoop:
Right. Yes, you can do stuff on your LinkedIn profile to say I’m looking.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Shoop:
It ended up being that the Head of HR at Cooper Union uses LinkedIn a lot.
Hellrigel:
Fantastic.
Shoop:
Yes, absolutely. It worked out.
Hellrigel:
Then this might be off, but GlobalFoundries [1:46:40], did they think because of your military link that you could bring in contracts and make them money?
Shoop:
They were most interested about my time at JIEDDO. In terms of that kind of a complex environment, working your way through that kind of a complex environment. [1:47:00]
Hellrigel:
Yes, at this point in your career you hadn’t been following the money, you’d been following the mission.
Shoop:
That’s right. That’s right.
Hellrigel:
That made sense. Like you said, that the focus, too, is undergraduate at West Point. You could continue [1:47:20] that mission.
Shoop:
Right. It was very familiar. Cooper Union has four ABET accredited programs. [Civil, Chemical, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering. Managing faculty, curriculum, and accreditation,] all of those kinds of things were just second nature to me because I had been doing that. The challenge for me was that [1:47:40] a place like Cooper Union is not anything at all like West Point.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]
Shoop:
Yes, I’m the Dean but the professors have opinions and they’re very vocal and open about sharing their opinions.
Hellrigel:
Are they unionized?
Shoop:
They are unionized. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
It’s a brave new world for you. [Laughing]
Shoop:
It is an incredibly brave new world. [1:48:00] I’ve got three unions. I’ve got a fulltime faculty union, an adjunct faculty union, and a staff union. I have to navigate the unions and tenure, all of that.
Hellrigel:
Your student base is different.
Shoop:
It is.
Hellrigel:
Differently disciplined. [Laughing]
Shoop:
It is. We always [1:48:20] used to say, I always used to say, we get some of the best students at West Point. We do. West Point attracts some of the best and brightest. But they’re also more well-rounded. They are good academically. The Cooper students [1:48:40] are great academically. We are a very small institution. We get students at Cooper Union that score 800 on their mathematics SATs. I mean they are just that good. They don’t do a lot of athletics. They don’t do a lot of leadership. They focus on intellectual [1:49:00] kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
Right. They’re chasing Pokémon cards.
Shoop:
That, too, yes [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
They also have athletics. Now Cooper Union is still free tuition?
Shoop:
We are getting back to free.
Hellrigel:
That was a big pull or attraction.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
[1:49:20] Cooper’s mission was education and training for the less well off.
Shoop:
Correct.
Hellrigel:
They could go to school, too. It was like the flip side of the Ivy League because of the mechanics’ training and all. [1:49:40] I know you have a hard stop, but is there anything we didn’t cover so far in this part that you would like to cover? We could pick up with it next time?
Shoop:
Let me go back and think about it a little bit.
Hellrigel:
Yes, Sir.
Shoop:
I think most of it, yes.
Hellrigel:
Then we’ll go through. We’ll [1:50:00] pick up with Cooper Union and we’ll talk about IEEE, your publications, and your elevation to Fellow of a variety of organizations. Then I’ll ask at the end is there anything I didn’t cover. Then also [1:50:20] if you had to do life over again would you have picked a different path or a slightly different path. Most people have no regrets. I’m not here to be a headshrinker.
Shoop:
[Laughing].
Hellrigel:
You know most people are retired that I speak to. You’re slightly atypical in that [1:50:40] you’re still working. Then it’s like what’s your next jump, the golf course or?
Shoop:
[Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Hawaii with Karen Bartleson.
Shoop:
Great.
Hellrigel:
I want to talk about the tradition that you sort of started with the challenge coin.
Shoop:
Perfect.
Hellrigel:
We have your challenge coin in the IEEE Archives. [1:51:00].
Shoop:
Good. Good [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Thank you, Sir. Sorry to take more time than we planned on. I’ll see you in two weeks.
Shoop:
Two weeks. Thank you.
Hellrigel:
Thank you. Bye, bye.
Shoop:
Have a great day.
Hellrigel:
You, too. Bye.
[START PART TWO]
Hellrigel:
[0:00:00] We are recording, so now I’ll do my introduction. Today is March 29, 2024. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel of the IEEE History Center. I’m with Dr. Barry Shoop, the 2016 President [0:00:20] of IEEE and currently Dean of Engineering at Cooper Union. We are recording Part 2 of his oral history. Good morning, Sir.
Shoop:
Good morning.
Hellrigel:
If you want, we can pick up at Cooper Union. We were talking about how after thirty-nine years in the military [0:00:40] you then made the jump to be Dean of Engineering at Cooper Union where you have a large, I guess, faculty and a diverse faculty and you’re in an urban environment. It’s unionized people [0:01:00] so it’s a brave adventure after thirty-nine years in the military? I would think.
Shoop:
It was an abrupt jump, and it is.
Hellrigel:
Also, this happens around the time of the COVID pandemic so that introduces new [0:01:20] challenges. You’re a techy person but to make that flip to all online and then economic challenges. I don’t know what you’d like to say about your, so far, five years? Starting your fifth year?
Shoop:
A little over five years. January [0:01:40], January of this year was my fifth year as the Dean.
Hellrigel:
You’ve got your feet wet. I do attend some of your virtual programs.
Shoop:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
The one on ethics about a month ago?
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That was pretty cool.
Shoop:
Mark Vasquez. Yes. [0:02:00] [He’s the Senior Program Manager of IEEE TechEthics.]
Hellrigel:
Yes, Mark, is a nice guy who works at IEEE.
Shoop:
He’s also a Cooper alum.
Hellrigel:
That’s right. Wow.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess a question I would ask is how are the Cooper alums different than what you’re used to. I mean you primarily taught at West Point. [0:02:20] What challenges and adventures?
Shoop:
Yes. I’ve been asked often to compare and contrast the students or the cadets at West Point with the students at Cooper Union. When I was at West Point, we always characterized [0:02:40] the students that we got as the best and brightest of America. West Point draws from all fifty states part of the kind of the mandate and the requirement. At Cooper Union what I would say is my perspective now, I still think that the [0:03:00] cadets at West Point are very, very good. They’re good in multiple dimensions because when you’re admitted to West Point, it’s not just academics. It’s also physical abilities, it’s also leadership abilities and those kinds of things. At Cooper Union it’s [0:03:20] primarily focused within the academic realm.
The students that we attract at Cooper Union are truly remarkable in terms of their intellectual ability and their academic abilities. The students that we get [0:03:40] to admit at Cooper could easily go to MIT or Carnegie Mellon or Cal Tech or other places. In fact, our graduates often go to those places for their Masters’ Degrees and Ph.Ds. Yes, I mean teaching at [0:04:00] Cooper Union is… as a faculty member and as an instructor, you really have to know your material because the students push the faculty. The students push each other as students but they also push the faculty. I mean the uniqueness of Cooper [0:04:20] is we… the overall acceptance rate at Cooper Union totally is down around the 15 percent range. We’re very selective.
Hellrigel:
It’s extremely competitive to gain admission.
Shoop:
Very, very selective. When we [0:04:40] look, since the pandemic we have been test optional, we don’t require SATs or ACTs or AP exam scores but the students that come to Cooper often submit those anyway. This incoming class for the fall of 2024, I think 84 percent of them have [0:05:00] submitted their test scores. The average SAT on the math this year is 770 out of 800.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
That’s an average. We often get students that max their SATs. They’re a very, very elite group, if you will. [0:05:20]
Hellrigel:
Right.
Shoop:
By having students in the classroom of that caliber, they raise the bar for everybody, not only the faculty member but for each other and so it’s a really intense and rigorous learning environment.
Hellrigel:
So far you enjoy it [0:05:40].
Shoop:
I do. I do. I mean there were some periods in the beginning when I wasn’t sure I was going to last very long as the Dean because when I came in, there were some challenges. I’ve been a leader for quite some time, and I consider myself fairly astute in kind of [0:06:00] reading the tea leaves, if you will. I knew that there were some challenges coming in. We talked about this before. In about 2014, Cooper Union went through this crisis where since [0:06:20] its inception, Peter Cooper founded Cooper Union as a free institution, so up until about 2014, I want to say it was free. Then in 2014, the new President decided that the financials and the economics were not sufficient and began charging tuition. [0:06:40] There was a big lawsuit from Cooper alums. Cooper Union lost that lawsuit, so they were required because the court found that Peter Cooper had founded it on the basis [0:07:00] of being free so it had to revert back to that. At that point they went through a ten-year plan. We’re in year six of that ten-year plan to get back to free and we’re all on track for getting back to free. Some of that was [0:07:20] tightening the belt in terms of financials internally, but also a big push on donations and foundation work and those kinds of things.
When I interviewed at Cooper, it was a fairly long interview. I think I went there three [0:07:40] times on three separate occasions. I met with faculty. I met with students. I met with all the administrators. I got a sense that there were some cultural issues particularly within the School of Engineering that had not yet been healed from that debate [0:08:00] and that fight. The School of Engineering at Cooper Union is the largest of the three schools, so we had faculty on both sides of that debate. It was a little bit of a toxic environment in terms of the faculty and then that bled over into the students. I recognized [0:08:20] that there was going to have to be a lot of work done to kind of bring that together. There was also distrust between the faculty and the administration.
As the new Dean coming in, I represented the administration, so I had to work through that. My first [0:08:40] year, probably the first year or year and a half, I spent trying to develop that. I was incredibly transparent in everything that I did. I sat down and I met with each faculty member for about an hour and talked to them one-on-one to get a sense for what they thought was going on, what they liked, [0:09:00] what they didn’t like, and what I could do. So, it was a rebuilding period.
In that period, in probably the first four years, the president came in about two years before I came in, she put in place [0:09:20] an early buyout program for the faculty because we had quite a number of very senior faculty. Her buyout program: I benefited from that. In the School of Engineering, I have thirty-four tenure track faculty, tenured or tenure track [0:09:40] faculty, and then on a given semester I run about seventy-five adjuncts. Total is close to one-hundred total faculty, but thirty-four of those are the fulltime faculty that administer the curriculum and do the work of the institution. [0:10:00] In the last four, four and a half years, I’ve hired eleven faculty members. I’ve turned over nearly a third of those faculty. All of them are young, coming straight from a Ph.D. program or out of a post-doc program. Young, energetic. Over this period, [0:10:20] we’ve really changed the complexion, if you will, of the fulltime faculty. We went from ten years ago; the fulltime faculty was 6.8 percent women. Today, we’re 42 percent women, so for an engineering school I think we’ve done a great job.
Hellrigel:
That’s phenomenal. [0:10:40]
Shoop:
With that came a corresponding change to the demographics of the student body. Two years ago, the incoming engineering class was gender equitable, 50 percent women, 50 percent men. [0:11:00]
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
It has really changed the climate all for the positive. We’ve introduced new curricular innovations, if you will, or pedagogical kinds of things. Things have gone [0:11:20] well. Early on, it was a tough, tough stride. I think it was after probably after six months or eight months, I came home one day and I said to my wife: I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I’m working far harder now than I have for the last ten years. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
What I realized was [0:11:40] as the Deputy Head at West Point, I had the opportunity to hire all of the senior leaders in the department and when I became the Department Head, they already knew me. They understood what my vision was. They understood how I liked to do business. Here at Cooper, I had to build that all [0:12:00] kind of from the ground up.
Hellrigel:
I guess to the people that hired you, you must have had the skillset needed because they knew the lay of the land bringing you in.
Shoop:
It’s kind of interesting because I probably would not have been. The President has told me this on several occasions [0:12:20] that she was surprised that the faculty recommended me because of my military background, because, I mean, academics generally don’t like structure and [Laughing] those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and if they [0:12:40] were senior faculty it might be legacies of the cultural war from the 1960s and 1970s.
Shoop:
[Laughing] Yes.
Hellrigel:
But that must have made you feel inspired that going from West Point to this unusual [0:13:00] university, compared to others, free, artisan background, and all, to start this brave new adventure [Laughing] in many ways.
Shoop:
[Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Also, you seem to have the ability to pivot, [0:13:20] figuring out what you need to do with this new job, and they had faith in you. You’re still there.
Shoop:
I’m still here, yes. They renewed my contract. Yes, it’s kind of interesting. You know I’ve led somewhat of a nontraditional military [0:13:40] life with twenty-five years at West Point teaching. But the other aspect of this that West Point allowed me to do what I think benefited me in this role is they allowed me to engage with professional societies. As a [0:14:00] traditional military leader, many people would like to tell people what to do as opposed to share a vision and share the journey kind of thing. I think that my professional society engagement with the largest portion of that being IEEE [0:14:20] but I was also active with the Optical Society of America, with SPIE, for a while even with ABET, and then obviously with IEEE. When you are a leader within a professional society [0:14:40] it takes some different leadership skills. The volunteers are not paid, so how do you motivate them to do things? Those are the skills that I think allowed me to be successful so far at Cooper. Set those same kind of skills [0:15:00].
IEEE
Hellrigel:
Would you like to add anything about Cooper, or do you want to take a jump to IEEE?
Shoop:
No, I think we can jump to IEEE. That’s fine.
Hellrigel:
In terms of time and such, I would think [0:15:20] down the road Cooper Union might do an oral history with you on your tenure [as Dean] there, or we could do a Part 3.
Shoop:
[Laughing] Sure.
Hellrigel:
Down the road, in 2016, you become the President of IEEE. In 2015, [0:15:40] you’re the President-Elect. That means you were actually elected in 2014. I guess we could start with, you’re pretty busy at the Academy and with other things, so why do you put your hat in the ring [0:16:00] in 2014? How did you become a candidate?
Shoop:
Well, so I guess maybe we can go back even a little bit further if it’s okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes, Sir.
Shoop:
I’ve been an IEEE member since I was at Penn State. I was a student member at Penn State [0:16:20] but [my only engagement was to receive] [IEEE] Spectrum. As I got more senior, when I was in Charlottesville, I participated more in the IEEE Photonics Society because of the optics background. I did that, but I wasn’t really deeply engaged. I guess it was [0:16:40] at Stanford, this wasn’t IEEE, but this kind of got my toe in the water for professional society support.
Remember Joe Goodman was my [Ph.D.] advisor at Stanford and while I was there [0:17:00] he became the President of the Optical Society of America. He came back from one of the annual meetings and he met with all of his graduate students, and he said what I found at this last meeting is that Stanford does not have a student branch of the Optical Society of America. That seems kind of [0:17:20] ironic given all the optics that goes on here. He says I think it would be good if we did this. A couple of us, a couple of his students, pulled together what was necessary to launch the student branch of the Optical Society of America. I became the President. [0:17:40] I was the inaugural President of that chapter. That was my introduction to really beginning some volunteer leadership. Then when I got to West Point, the Optical Society of America reached out to me and said, hey, you’ve been a President of a student branch, would you like to continue your service. They gave me some options. [0:18:00] I began [my volunteer leadership] with the Optical Society of America. When I first got to West Point, I ended up on the Board of Directors of the Optical Society.
Then I think it was about two or three years after I got to West Point, I was introduced by a more [0:18:20] senior faculty member to the Mid-Hudson Section of the IEEE. They took me to a dinner meeting, and I think the dinner meeting went into a tour of a radio station in the Hudson Valley. They kind of courted me and I began my journey of [0:18:40] [IEEE] volunteer leadership there. I became the Secretary and Treasurer of the IEEE Mid-Hudson Section, which was a very small section, less than 1,000 members. Then from there, I became engaged in Region 1, ultimately becoming the Region 1 [0:19:00] Director. After that, becoming the Secretary of IEEE. I put in two terms as the Secretary and then became the Vice President of MGA (Member and Geographic Activities). [0:19:20] I did that.
Then I took a little bit of a hiatus from that because as I got further and further up, it required more and more time. By that time, I was the EE Program Director moving [0:19:40] in to become the Deputy Head of the Department. But then after a couple of years I was still engaged somewhat in some of the committee work. People continued to ask me what’s next, what are you going to do next. That’s when I [0:20:00] decided in 2014 that if I was going to try to run for IEEE President that that was the time because I didn’t want too much of a lapse between my Vice President [of MGA] years and the [IEEE] President. I had run for President [0:20:20] right after my Vice President of MGA and was unsuccessful in getting the nomination of the Board, so that kind of set me back a little bit. Then in 2014, I had mentors and colleagues that highly recommended that I try again, [0:20:40] so that’s what I did.
Hellrigel:
Okay, we could take a step back and we could follow your history. What did you like about going to the Section meetings, the IEEE Mid-Hudson Section? What attracted [0:21:00] you to become more active? We’ll start at the Section level and then go up to Region Director.
Shoop:
Yes. It intrigued me. One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about the meetings, the Section level meetings, is that the [0:21:20] Hudson Valley has a rich history in terms of technology. IBM is here. In the heydays of IBM, there were members, more senior members, that would come to these meetings that could reminisce about what kinds of things [0:21:40] they used to do at IBM. Then there were others that were current members of IBM, so I enjoyed that tie to industry. To be part of something that supported other people in their professional lives, so that [0:22:00] really attracted me.
Hellrigel:
Right, and then the social aspect, too. You could decompress a little bit.
Shoop:
As much social as engineers do. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] Well, yes, I guess it’s all relative.
Shoop:
It is.
Hellrigel:
Some Societies will have [0:22:20] monthly dinners.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Others are dormant and maybe they’ll get together once a year. Now the rage seems to be these online web meetings.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
With IBM certainly [0:22:40] you were involved in one of their transitional periods, too. You could hear the generational shifts of Big Blue, IBM. You’re at that. Did this bring you then in to attend any IEEE conferences, or are you still mostly [0:23:00] working on the Section level?
Shoop:
Yes. No, no. Once I got to West Point, I became much more active because I was not a tenured faculty member, but I was in the research center, so I was actually doing research. I actually did attend quite a few Optical Society [of America] [0:23:20] meetings, SPIE meetings as well as IEEE Photonics Society meetings. I started actively pursuing research and presenting at those conferences.
Hellrigel:
As an aside, today, I have my IEEE Photonics Society water bottle.
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[0:23:40] Then you’re active there and then you become more active in the Region, and you become a Region Director. Region 1 is pretty large?
Shoop:
Pretty large. [Over 40,000 members.]
Hellrigel:
In terms of membership.
Shoop:
It is in the northeast. [0:24:00]
Hellrigel:
How did you get involved at the Regional level then?
Shoop:
As a Section Chair, we would have, I want to say, two or three meetings at the Region level every year. They would bring all of the Sections [0:24:20] together. It gave me an opportunity to kind of see what other Sections within Region 1 were doing. Then it also gave me an opportunity to see the Region 1 leadership and what kinds of things they did. Again, for me it was a good opportunity [0:24:40] because it expanded outside of the Hudson Valley. We then took in kind of New York City and Boston and other areas and those are also tech hubs. Having an opportunity to get together with people who were practicing either in academia or in industry in those areas and to see [0:25:00] what was going on and to see the influence of what a Region 1 Director was doing because once you get to be a Region Director, you sit on the Board of Directors of the IEEE. Again, it intrigued me: [0:25:20] large, complex organizations providing leadership to try to drive those organizations forward and support the membership there.
Hellrigel:
When you were Section Chair of Mid-Hudson.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Any challenges? [0:25:40] What’s it like to be a Section Chair?
Shoop:
Yes, the challenges with the Section Chair, particularly if you have a diverse geographic area, is getting people together. Trying to establish [0:26:00] programs that would draw people to come to meetings, you have to be creative in terms of doing that. We ended up doing a wide variety of things because some folks, like you said, would want to come to a dinner meeting [0:26:20] or a dinner/dance kind of a meeting where they might want to bring their spouse to it. Others would prefer to come to a lecture, a technical lecture on a particular subject. The other thing that we started doing a lot more when I became the Section Chair was visiting industry. [0:26:40] As I said, I think, the first meeting that I went to was an automated radio station in Kingston, [New York] I think it was. IBM was here. IBM opened their doors to us. We could go in and we could see it. It was about the time that they were shipping [0:27:00] Deep Blue, the computer. So, those kinds of things. You had to have a kind of a diverse portfolio of things that the membership would want to come and do. I think that was probably the hardest thing and then moving it around so that everybody [0:27:20] didn’t always have to travel to IBM. You have representation all the way from Kingston almost down to New York City and then west. Identifying locations for having those meetings that people could get to.
Hellrigel:
Did you ever go to Sections Congress? [0:27:40]
Shoop:
I didn’t really start going to Sections Congress until I got engaged at the Regional level.
Hellrigel:
Okay. We could jump to the Region level. I guess you’re networking amongst the Section Chairs [0:28:00] and such because it’s going to be an elected office.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
At this point you’re at West Point. They’re giving you a little bit of release time because Region Director is a lot of traveling, sometimes going to IEEE Milestone dedications. [0:28:20] How was your tenure as Region Director?
Shoop:
It was good enough that [it] warranted that I wanted to do more and go higher. I liked the ability to impact a [0:28:40] large group of professionals across the entire Region. As I said, as a Region Director, I then ended up going to the Board meetings. I got an opportunity to see kind of the inner workings of the IEEE at the highest level as a Board member. I served on a [0:29:00] number of Committees at the Board level. When I was Region Director, prior to Region Director and when I first became the Region Director, the organization that oversaw the Regions [0:29:20] and the Sections was called the Regional Activities Board. It was called RAB.
Pedro Ray was either the [IEEE] President-Elect or President at the time. I think at one of my first meetings as a Region Director, he approached me [0:29:40] and suggested that there might be a better organizational structure for RAB that’s much more focused on the members. So, I actually chaired the committee to convert RAB into MGA. We spent [0:30:00] roughly a year going through that whole process, getting constituents’ inputs, and all of that. Ultimately, the transformation from RAB to MGA was under my tenure as the chair of that committee as a Region Director. [0:30:20] Again, it was a satisfying kind of an opportunity because I had the opportunity to change the IEEE for the better, focusing on the member. It also gave me a tremendous amount of visibility [0:30:40] across the Board for moving into becoming the Secretary and moving into becoming the Vice President.
Hellrigel:
I’ll take a step back. Why did Pedro Ray and others think that IEEE needed to focus more on the member? What’s going on to initiate [0:31:00] this?
Shoop:
When you think about it, it was Regional Activities, and it didn’t conjure the idea that we were there as a professional society to really support the membership and the individual members. More so than [0:31:20] just a change in name, it was a change in focus and a change in philosophy in terms of what this group does. I mean Technical Activities is all about the individual disciplinary technical areas. Educational Activities is about education. [0:31:40] Within the context of Regional Activities, you kind of lose the idea that you’re really there to support the member and the membership.
Hellrigel:
The members then must have appreciated this because there’s the tendency of asking why am I paying [0:32:00] membership fees and are they just taking my money. What are some of the challenges though to shift? Why do you change RAB to MGA?
Shoop:
Well, I mean [0:32:20] in any organization, change is hard. IEEE had been around for quite a long time. There was a lot questioning, why, why, why should we do this? There was a lot of being transparent in terms of what we were trying to do and [0:32:40] ensuring that this wasn’t a move to try to take over anything. But, yes, any kind of change [0:33:00] always meets with resistance. Even within the groups in RAB, there were questions about why we were doing this. We just had to be very thoughtful, very deliberate and answer all the questions. Then if somebody raised [0:33:20] an issue, we would go down that pathway and try to figure it out.
Hellrigel:
I’m shocked it only took a year.
Shoop:
[Laughing] Yes. Yes, me, too. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Given that sometimes constitutional amendments and that might roll around for a few years. [0:33:40] This needed just the action of the Board of Directors, or did you have to put it to membership vote?
Shoop:
This just required the Board. I believe it just required the Board of Directors.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that’s what I think so that made it a little complex.
Shoop:
Exactly. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then [0:34:00] I know MGA has IEEE Life Members in it as well as WiE [IEEE Women in Engineering], so its responsibilities were more than just membership, it also included these Affinity Groups.
Shoop:
Right, exactly.
Hellrigel:
I don’t know, IEEE Young Professionals is also part of MGA for administrative purposes.
Shoop:
They’re [0:34:20] a part of it.
Hellrigel:
Yes, things that function kind of like a society, but differently? You know a different clustering pattern.
Shoop:
Exactly. Exactly.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing this and this is about what year?
Shoop:
It was probably in 2006, 2007. [0:34:40]
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That’s also a trying time economically. The global economy is going to soon have the 2008 housing meltdown. I don’t know if this is a time when in IEEE people are questioning financial [0:35:00] stability and all. Did anybody look at finances? Soon you’re going to be Secretary, and then Treasurer. What are some of the big issues that you’re grappling with?
[Crosstalk]
Shoop:
At the Board?
Hellrigel:
As members.
Shoop:
Oh, as members. Well, I mean [0:35:20] this was a period for me, as I said, I was kind of drawn into the Section by the industry members.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Shoop:
What I began to realize was, and this kind of became a platform for my Presidential [0:35:40] years, if you will, is that we had been losing industry members. We had become much more of kind of an ivory tower. All of the TAB activities were focused on journal articles which were published predominantly by [0:36:00] academics. We had lost quite a number of industry representatives. When we actually started IEEE or even before IEEE, it was predominantly an industry-focused kind of a professional society so we had strayed from that area and that vision, if you will. [0:36:20] Those were some of the things that we were beginning to deal with at the board level. Talking about.
Hellrigel:
This was a successful campaign in that the President, the President-Elect, Pedro Ray approached [0:36:40] you, so you’re becoming more well-known or recognized in IEEE perhaps for your leadership and organizational skills to get things done.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Then your next step, I don’t know if you see it as an evolution or just [0:37:00] taking advantage of opportunities as you’re moving through. Then you’re going to make your next move. You’re Region Director. A couple of questions about that and then we’ll move on. What were some of the high points or fun things that you got to do?
Shoop:
[0:37:20] [Pause].
Hellrigel:
If that’s a silly question, we can move on.
Shoop:
Well. Yes, I mean I’m just trying to reflect. I mean it was a long time ago, too. [Laughing] The aspects [0:37:40] I enjoyed: I thoroughly enjoyed the Regional meetings that we would have, again, because it was gathering people from across the Region, very diverse folks from all walks of life and all kind of [0:38:00] professions, some academics at the assistant professor level, some at the full professor level. We had vice presidents of some corporations. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to get together and talk and engage with those people. It was just something that I enjoyed. It’s kind of like being with soldiers. [0:38:20]
Hellrigel:
Then this gathering is taking people from across all of the different [IEEE] Societies [and Regions], so you have a true cross mix of people. Maybe you’re not just focusing on academic papers. You’re talking more about the life and the health and the future of [0:38:40] the Region, so that gives you some variety. There are some people that just want to go to technical conferences.
Shoop:
Right, right.
Hellrigel:
Your next step then in IEEE will be as Secretary?
Shoop:
Secretary was the next, yes. [0:39:00] That was 2008 and 2009. I was the Secretary for two years. I was told that I was [unique], I forget what the terminology that Pedro Ray used when I was actually elected as the Secretary. But historically before I was elected as the Secretary [0:39:20] the Secretary actually came from outside of the United States, one of the other [international] Regions.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
Either Region [10 or] 9 or 8 or 7. Elsewhere. I was one of the first elected Secretaries that came from within [0:39:40] the United States.
Hellrigel:
Did he say why they decided to do that?
Shoop:
My understanding is that the Secretary, it’s an important role as the [0:40:00] parliamentarian and helping orchestrate and organize how the Board functions. It was not a position that required a tremendous exposure across all [0:40:20] of the Board of Directors in terms of being elected to the position, as best I can tell.
Hellrigel:
Okay, you’re the parliamentarian. Are you taking the minutes, or do they have staff doing that?
Shoop:
It’s staff. [0:40:40] Staff actually takes the minutes. But in terms of putting the agenda together, rationalizing that it’s not just the President that goes out and identifies what the agenda items are for the board. The Secretary plays a role in that.
Hellrigel:
Right, because all the [0:41:00] paperwork would say funnel into you and then you have to make the game plan.
Shoop:
Right. Right.
Hellrigel:
You have some staff helping you?
Shoop:
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
What did you enjoy about that?
Shoop:
Well, a similar kind of a thing. The same theme of I guess my [0:41:20] background is I have come to enjoy engaging with kind of complex organizations and help driving them forward. The Board of Directors is a very complex organization. It’s a very large Board of Directors. Probably larger than it really should be but we [0:41:40] tried to fix that but weren’t able to fix that.
Hellrigel:
Yes, you’re a generation of the Presidents, many of them have talked about that. Was it thirty-one members or something? How do you get a quorum? Then the expenses and whatever.
Shoop:
How do you [0:42:00] stay on time? All those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, you’re the parliamentarian. You’re the Robert’s Rules person.
Shoop:
Correct, yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you ever have to use a stopwatch to keep people to their time limit and to tell them you have three minutes?
Shoop:
I did. I did.
Hellrigel:
How did that go over?
Shoop:
I was [0:42:20] fairly effective with it, but not necessarily liked for it. [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Did your predecessor use a stopwatch or did you introduce that?
Shoop:
I’m not sure [muffled audio].
Hellrigel:
Yes, well, like any parliamentary, if somebody gets on the [0:42:40] pulpit and just won’t be quiet.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What were some of the challenges? Did you have any people that you would have to say you’re out of order? You can’t speak now?
Shoop:
I did. I did. That caused some [0:43:00] friction. In some cases.
Hellrigel:
Right, because some recent people I’ve been interviewing said some of them said over time people became less compliant with Robert’s Rules, given certain issues and that became a challenge to try to keep order.
Shoop:
Right. [0:43:20]
Hellrigel:
Any type of order.
Shoop:
I’m not a huge fan of Robert’s Rules of Order because they’re very rigid and strict, but in an organization like IEEE, particularly at the Board level, it has its place because if you want to conduct the business [0:43:40] of this organization, which is a very large and complex organization, and you have a Board meeting that spans two days, you have a finite amount of time to get the business done. You really have to have mechanisms in place that allow you [0:44:00] to manage that and Robert’s Rules is one of those mechanisms.
Hellrigel:
But the meetings themselves, then, if you’re the Secretary, they might be stressful because it’s on you to keep it working.
Shoop:
They were incredibly stressful, yes. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Did you have the opportunity to [0:44:20] be reelected or was it time to move on?
Shoop:
I was reelected. I served two years.
Hellrigel:
Two years.
Shoop:
Yes, 2008 and
Hellrigel:
2009.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Could you have served again?
Shoop:
No.
Hellrigel:
Okay, a term limit.
Shoop:
Yes, there was.
Hellrigel:
[0:44:40] When you’re Secretary, you’re also starting to see more. Well, as a Region Director you were on the Board.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
But now as Secretary, you’re seeing the behind the scenes’ mechanisms.
Shoop:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
You also worked very closely with the President? [0:45:00]
Shoop:
Yes. Yes, so the meetings, so again, as you moved up, so as a Regional Director you sat on the Board, you participated in the Board, but you basically kind of addressed things that were brought to the Board from others, from the Presidents, the Three Ps [IEEE President-Elect, President, and Past President], the Secretary, [0:45:20] the Treasurer, those kinds of things. Now as a Secretary, you got to see actually behind that. We had many more meetings. I was much more engaged with the Executive Director, much more engaged with the Three Ps. We would have our legal counsel. It was all of those kinds of things I got to [0:45:40] see much more of behind the scenes what the base financial information was and all of those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
Are you meeting in person? The Board of Directors are in person, but then all these other meetings, are they telephone meetings, or are you traveling?
Shoop:
When I was on the Board, [0:46:00] we held three Board Series meetings a year. They were weeklong. You would come in on a Monday or a Tuesday and you would spend the entire week through Sunday. So, the Board meeting was on a Saturday and a Sunday at the end. Before that, there would be [0:46:20] MGA meetings, there would be committee meetings, TAB meetings, other things to kind of work their way through. If anything came out of those individual meetings that required the Board to address it then we had the Board meeting at the end of the series. It was three full weeks [0:46:40] of the year that were face to face. Most of them, most of them were in New Jersey, down in New Brunswick which is beautiful. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, they have --
Shoop:
Well, the Hilton or the --
Hellrigel:
The Heldrich Hotel [and Conference Center].
Shoop:
Yes. Then in between [0:47:00] we would generally have, when I was the Secretary, we would generally have a telephone meeting once a month with the Three Ps, general counsel, Secretary, Treasurer to kind of go over what was going on.
Hellrigel:
Those would be a few hours, or you’d spend the whole day?
Shoop:
No. A few hours. [0:47:20] An hour or two hours.
Hellrigel:
This is a lot of meetings.
Shoop:
It’s a tremendous amount of meetings, yes.
Hellrigel:
Also, all the stress and the time. But you’re also, at this point, at the Board of Directors working closely, you’re [0:47:40] you’re more engaged with people globally.
Shoop:
Right. Exactly.
Hellrigel:
I know now the Board of Directors doesn’t really meet in New Brunswick anymore. They go to Orlando and Paris and wherever [Laughing].
Shoop:
Well, yes.
Hellrigel:
Huh. [0:48:00] That’s a change. I guess you liked this position well enough that you continued your work. Your next post will be Treasurer?
Shoop:
No, next post was Vice President of MGA.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that’s right.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Right, Vice President.
Shoop:
Yes, I served one year [0:48:20] there. I could have served two. That was in 2010. I could have served two. I decided and I opted not to run for reelection. It was kind of a medical issue. I [0:48:40] would, as the Vice President of MGA, I traveled a lot. Not as much as the President but I traveled a lot because I had all ten Regions and so I was traveling and it was probably May, May of 2010, I want to say. [0:49:00] I had just gotten back from a trip, an international trip. It was close to graduation at West Point, so we had a function where we had all of the cadets, all of the students, and we had a lot of the parents coming in and so there was a lot of [0:49:20] socialization. I, as the Department Head, a Deputy Head at that time, I had a lot of engagement with folks, and I had come home and ended up passing out.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
My wife had to take me to the emergency room, and they did [0:49:40] a whole bunch of tests on me and admitted me to the hospital overnight. The next morning, they released me, and the doctor just said your body has just decided to reset. Apparently, there’s just Type A personalities, he said he’d seen it before. Type A personalities just push themselves [0:50:00] and all of a sudden you ended up a forced reset.
Hellrigel:
Exhausted.
Shoop:
Yes, a forced reset. At that point, my wife and my daughter, [Aubrey,] particularly, counseled me that I should stop this, so I did not run for reelection at that particular point. I think my first call [0:50:20] when I made that decision was to Howard Michel because Howard had been interested in running MGA. I believe he ended up picking that up in 2011 and 2012 as Vice President of MGA. [0:50:40] He’s obviously from Region 1, so we overlapped quite a bit once we got to the Regional level. I was a Region Director. He was a Region Director. He ended up being Vice President for MGA. I was Vice President of MGA. He preceded me being the [IEEE] President.
Hellrigel:
Right [0:51:00].
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You got along well enough. [Laughing]
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
With this schedule of Vice President of MGA are you on the road traveling a few times a month?
Shoop:
Yes, that was about it. Probably twice a month.
Hellrigel:
Yes, making you [0:51:20] attuned to the membership also meant you had to get out to see the members.
Shoop:
Right. Exactly. Talk to the members about the individual Regions, what the issues were. The issues are very different in different Regions as you might expect. You know in the United States [0:51:40] a lot of the Regions were similar 1 through 6. A lot of times they had similar problems although when you got to the Midwest and you ended up with Regions that spanned very, very large areas, geographical areas that may have a mountain range in the middle of their Region, how do you go about [0:52:00] facilitating member engagement and those kinds of things in those kinds of places?
Hellrigel:
Yes. Not in the winter.
Shoop:
Not in the winter, exactly. Then you go to places like Region 8 which is just absolutely massive.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Shoop:
They have very different challenges even within [0:52:20] one Region that spans such a large area. So, it was an opportunity for me to get out and try to understand what the problems or what the issues were in each of these Regions and then be able to try to shape the budget and the engagement [0:52:40] plan in such a way that we could accommodate, or we could facilitate support of those various disparities.
Hellrigel:
As the VP of MGA, do you create your own agenda or does MGA say this is our game plan?
Shoop:
No. As the Vice President, [0:53:00] when I came in, I had a plan for what I was going to do for the year that I was doing. It’s kind of like the President. You come up with your own idea within the boundaries of what the budget is and those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
What was your game plan?
Shoop:
It was really [0:53:20] a continuation of creating MGA because when I became the Vice President of MGA, MGA was still fairly young as an organization. So really focusing on the member and trying to figure out how we could [0:53:40] best support the individual member. Were there things that we could do to facilitate that in a better way? It was really a kind of a building out of the philosophy and the concept of MGA.
Hellrigel:
Oh, excuse me. I don’t [0:54:00] know why that phone went off. Now you’re the VP of MGA and you’re doing a lot of traveling. This is at a point where Region 10 is growing quite a bit.
Shoop:
Yes, it is.
Hellrigel:
Some of the challenges might be engaging [0:54:20] student members. I don’t know. If you had to pick like say three of your biggest projects at that point.
Shoop:
Oh…
Hellrigel:
Or one?
Shoop:
Yes. It was about engagement of the individual member, but that spectrum [0:54:40] of the individual member spanned such a large area. I mean you had Life Members. You had regular members. You had Fellows. Each of these populations. You go down there, you look at Young Professionals, you look at Women in Engineering, you look at the [0:55:00] different Affinity Groups and then you look at students. Each of those groups within the category of member has different needs, so we were trying to develop programs that could target and support each of those individual [0:55:20] areas. That was probably one of the larger things that we were doing at the time.
Hellrigel:
But exhausting because you’re trying to grapple with the game plan for the whole global network.
Shoop:
Exactly. Exactly.
Hellrigel:
If you didn’t become [0:55:40] unwell or exhausted, would you have looked at a second year?
Shoop:
I think I probably would have.
Hellrigel:
How did this impact your day to day? I mean it’s hard to be teaching and all of that at West Point.
Shoop:
Yes. Fortunately, by the time this occurred, [0:56:00] I was more senior so my teaching load was much smaller than a full level teaching load. [Regarding] the administration, I had amazing people working for me that could pick up the slack and I was always accessible by phone or by email. [0:56:20] If there were ever any questions my staff would reach out to me to get questions answered. Again, I owe a tremendous amount [of gratitude] to the West Point leadership, to the Dean and the Superintendent there at the time, and [0:56:40] the Department Head that allowed me to do those kinds of things and kind of step back a little bit from that role.
Hellrigel:
Then as your body is resetting you step away from IEEE for a little bit?
Shoop:
I did. I did. I mean I still stayed on some smaller committees. [0:57:00] I chaired the Governance Committee for a couple of years. I was a member and I chaired it from 2008 to 2009, I guess it was. I did some other things. I kept my fingers in the pool, if you will, but it was a much [0:57:20] reduced workload, so I was able to kind of regain my composure.
Hellrigel:
Or your vigor I think the Greeks would call it.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
However, you’re not stepping away too far from it.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Then your next [0:57:40] adventure would be as Treasurer?
Shoop:
No.
Hellrigel:
Oh, no?
Shoop:
The next was President.
Hellrigel:
President.
Shoop:
Yes, President-Elect.
Hellrigel:
Okay, I don’t know why I keep trying to make you Treasurer. [Laughing]
Shoop:
[Laughing].
Hellrigel:
You take a couple of years and slow down, [0:58:00] but why get back in the ring?
Shoop:
I missed it. I did. It’s kind of one of those things, like I said, I did run for President-Elect and was unsuccessful in getting the Board’s nomination. You then [0:58:20] never really know why you don’t get that nomination because it’s supposed to be a fairly closed kind of a debate or a deliberation. I did hear from some friends that there was a suggestion that [0:58:40] West Point would never let me be the President because it takes far too much time, so those kind of rumbled around in the back of my mind. I thought that I could be an effective, a good President and it’s kind of like getting [0:59:00] to the last rung on the ladder and not taking the next step when you’re that close.
Hellrigel:
Then did you have to get the word out, your friends get the word out, that no, no, no, West Point will really let him do this?
Shoop:
No, I didn’t have to do that. When I decided to run, [0:59:20] I actually went to the Dean and the Superintendent, and I talked to them personally and I said here’s what the requirement is in terms of time. When I went before the Board and made the presentation, I was very clear that I already had the approval of the Superintendent. That this [0:59:40] was not going to be an impediment so I kind of nipped that in the bud right there.
Hellrigel:
Okay. When you’re they’re going to have a field of candidates that they sort of interview.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Okay. I forgot that part of the process. The first time they interviewed you, you impressed them, but [1:00:00] they didn’t think you’d get the release time. Now you come back and say don’t worry about it, I have the release time.
Shoop:
Exactly. Exactly. Yes, usually the process is there’s either three or four candidates that come before the Board. Then the Board has the ability to select either two or three to move forward [1:00:20] onto the ballot. Generally, it’s two. I forget who else was running against me, but there were at least three and I was not selected the first time and then the second time I was in 2014.
Hellrigel:
What did your family think about this because they were [1:00:40] concerned about your health and now you’re going to jump into the hot seat again.
Shoop:
My daughter thought I was crazy. [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
[Laughing].
Shoop:
My wife is always supportive of what I try to do. She said she would support whatever I wanted to do.
Hellrigel:
[1:01:00] How do they tell you that you’re the successful candidate? Did you get a phone call?
Shoop:
You actually go before the Board of Directors, and you give a presentation. You answer questions. Then they send you outside and then at the end they call all the candidates [1:01:20] back in and then they say congratulations Joe and Bill you are the candidates that will be going forward. So, it was a kind of a face to face right there. But you knew at that point you were going to be a candidate.
Hellrigel:
Wow. [1:01:40] Then you have to figure out, I don’t know if the right word is, a campaign?
Shoop:
Yes. Yes, you have to then decide how are you going to go about campaigning. I mean the candidates will get invited to all of the Region meetings to present their [platform]. There’s a [1:02:00] process. You generally stand up some kind of a web page that describes what your background is and all of that. I think I sent you the link. Mine is still up. You do those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
What’s going to be your [1:02:20] pitch then?
Shoop:
My campaign was really focused on industry engagement. Turning that around. That was my primary focus was trying to increase industry engagement that had dropped off in terms of our [1:02:40] industry membership and we had to become more relevant to industry.
Hellrigel:
That seems to be a continued initiative. I know this year President Tom Coughlin is interested in industry. He comes from industry.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Prioritize that industry stays engaged and the Young Professionals. [1:03:00] So you’re going to do this, and you must have traveled quite a bit campaigning to all the Regions?
Shoop:
Yes, yes. There was a series of things. Like I said, each of the ten Regions, so there were ten trips, to each of the Region meetings. [1:03:20] Then there were some other smaller trips. Generally, during the campaigning period, you have to agree with your campaign rival, if you will, that you will both be at a certain location. I couldn’t [1:03:40] just say I’m going to go to Region 1 and let the other candidate not come and not tell him. It had to be a level field. There had to be a kind of a debate between the two candidates.
Hellrigel:
You would each make your presentation. Did you ever actually have a debate? [1:04:00]
Shoop:
Whether you call it a debate, both of us were on the podium. Both of us gave our pitch in terms of what we would do. Then the members would ask questions of each of us. It’s not really a debate like a Presidential debate like we have. There were no name-callings [1:04:20] or anything like that.
Hellrigel:
No threats.
Shoop:
Right. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Who were you running against?
Shoop:
I was running against Fred Mintzer.
Hellrigel:
That’s right. Anything enjoyable about this campaigning? It’s stressful.
Shoop:
It was stressful. [1:04:40] I learned a lot in terms of presentations. You have to learn that you don’t necessarily have to answer the question that’s asked of you.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] Yes, I heard that. [Laughing] [1:05:00]
Shoop:
Yes, you have to take the opportunity to say, well, instead of that question, I’m going to answer this question because it focuses on what my strength is in this particular area.
Hellrigel:
Right, the communications people, say, stay on point.
Shoop:
Right, exactly.
Hellrigel:
Also, be sure that you’re not dragged into an alleyway [1:05:20] because sometimes people will come to a meeting just to be provocative. I guess the other colloquial term is not to take the bait. Then how do you find out that are elected?
Shoop:
You get a call. [1:05:40]
Hellrigel:
From the current President or the Board?
Shoop:
The current President calls you, yes. He [or she] calls you and tells you either you’ve been selected, or you haven’t been selected before it’s announced. They do the tally of all of the ballots and everything. Then just before it’s released you get a telephone call.
Hellrigel:
This would be [1:06:00] Howard Michel? I’ll have to check that. During that phone call, did the current IEEE President give you any advice on this call?
Shoop:
No. Yes, Howard was the President-Elect. I want to say it was de Marca.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that’s right, right.
Shoop:
I think it was de Marca [1:06:20].
Hellrigel:
Yes, J. Roberto de Marca.
Shoop:
Roberto, yes. It was just you know, congratulations, the votes are in, you’re going to be the President-Elect.
Hellrigel:
Then how do you prepare? You find out, I guess this is around [1:06:40] October.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Then January 1, you’re the President-Elect. You’re one of the Three Ps.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
How do you psychologically or organizationally then get revved up?
Shoop:
[1:07:00] You’re already, to a certain degree. The campaign had stopped a month or two before the election results came in, but you’ve already been fairly revved up. You’ve already developed your pitch, your theme, and what it is that you want [1:07:20] to focus on, so you’ve got all of that material. What I did between October and January was really relaxed a little bit because it was fairly stressful and a lot of travel. I relaxed a little bit and then I reflected on kind of what my message had been and then [1:07:40] tried to make sure that I refined that as I went in. Again, as the President-Elect you’re not going to walk in and then impose your ideas, so I also spent some time talking with Howard. We had a couple of meetings prior to January [1:08:00] to talk through what his priorities were and how I could support him as the President-Elect within the context that I had of this idea of industry engagement, he was very supportive of that. I had some subcommittees or ad hoc committees that [1:08:20] I could run to begin my process to get ready for when I became the President, but also knowing full-well that I was there as the President-Elect to support the President.
Hellrigel:
At this point, does the President say here’s your schedule? [1:08:40] He’s the incoming president. How do you get your schedule as the President-Elect? The President hands it to you?
Shoop:
It’s kind of a staff run process. The President gets first right of refusal. There is a series of meetings, a series of things like [IEEE] Milestones, [1:09:00] conferences, other kinds of things, so the President gets to look at what the calendar is for the year and decide what he or she would like to do. Then the second [choice] is the President-Elect and then the third is the Past President. That’s kind of the [1:09:20] pecking order. My travel year as President-Elect was not overly onerous. It was probably on par or less than my travel as Vice President [of MGA].
Hellrigel:
Any memorable trips or events? [1:09:40] I guess you went to IEEE Milestone dedications, Region activities, conferences, etc. Does anything stick out?
Shoop:
Nothing particular, no.
Hellrigel:
What was it like working with [President] Howard Michel and [Past President] Roberto de Marca?
Shoop:
I enjoyed very much working with Howard. [1:10:00] Like I said, I’d known Howard for quite a number of years. We had worked together. He’s from the Air Force.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Shoop:
I bugged him all the time about the Air Force being a lesser military service than the Army. You know we had those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] Inter-service rivalry?
Shoop:
Yes, the rivalries that went on there. [1:10:20] But I worked well with Howard. Roberto was a little bit, he had done what he wanted to do, I guess, as President and he had somewhat backed off quite a bit. We didn’t have quite as much engagement. He did [1:10:40] not come from MGA, so he had a little bit different perspective than what we had.
Hellrigel:
At this point, is Howard giving you some advice?
Shoop:
He is. Yes. In terms of what he did the year as President-Elect. [1:11:00]
Hellrigel:
I was always curious about how much mentoring went on between the Three Ps. Maybe that’s the wrong term.
Shoop:
Yes. No, I’ve seen dysfunctional Three Ps where [1:11:20] they have very different opinions and very different perspectives to the point that they just didn’t [work together].
Hellrigel:
Didn’t mesh at all.
Shoop:
Yes. They sat in the Board meeting together, but that was the extent of it. I think that I would like to think that the Three Ps [1:11:40] that we had when Howard was the Past President, I was the President, and Karen Bartleson was the President-Elect was one of the most seamless kind of years with the Three Ps. Even though Karen came from the Standards Association [1:12:00], she came from industry. Very, very logical, very good perspective. The three of us got along very well.
Hellrigel:
That’s what each of you have said.
Shoop:
Yes. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
One of my jokes is the Three Ps are not always in the same pod. [1:12:20]
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I’ve heard some stories. So, you had a very enjoyable year as you’re getting ready for your year as IEEE President. How does that segue happen between the [1:12:40] President-Elect to the President? The calendar flips, but how do you get ready?
Shoop:
Yes. For me, probably again the same timeline, probably the October leading up to when I became the President, from that period on, I had seen what the [1:13:00] ad hoc committees were doing, I had seen what Howard had put in place. I was now beginning to say, okay, now I’m going to revert back. I’m going to go back. Industry is going to be my priority. So, I am laying out the agenda for my year as the President, particular for that first Board meeting [1:13:20] in January, kind of laying out here’s what my vision is for the year. This is what you can expect me to be focusing on for the year. That was a lot of preparation time. Then coming up to where are we going to have the Board Retreat, where are we going to have a Board meeting, and we are going to have a Board Retreat. [1:13:40] All of that kind of stuff was finalized in the kind of the November and December timeframe.
Hellrigel:
You get to select the place for the retreat and that’s in January.
Shoop:
That’s correct.
Hellrigel:
Where did you go?
Shoop:
We went to I want to say it was St. [Thomas] [1:14:00] in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We didn’t have to have passports, so the retreat was a U.S. [territory]. Well, people went to California, they went to Hawaii, and others places, trying to get out of the cold of the northeast. [1:14:20]
Hellrigel:
You are at the retreat, and this is where you will talk to the Board less formally maybe and with select staff about your game plan for the year.
Shoop:
Right. Also, as part of the retreat, during [1:14:40] this period, we had engaged with an external organization called Syntegrity, so it was a group that came in and facilitated kind of strategic planning.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Shoop:
We had done that a couple of times. Howard had done that. I’m not sure if [1:15:00] Roberto had done that or not. But during that period, at least, probably three, four, maybe five years, this external organization would help us. It was an organization found by some of the senior staff at IEEE and it was a way to bring people together to kind of brainstorm. [1:15:20] We would set questions and conditions and what kinds of things to discuss like how do we engage industry membership better. Then everybody would come together in small groups and large groups and try to come up with brainstorming ideas of how you might do that. [1:15:40] Then at the end of the process, Syntegrity would help us facilitate kind of some key milestones, key decisions, and those kinds of things. It was facilitated offsite.
Hellrigel:
Planning. Syntegrity was founded by [1:16:00] retired or former IEEE senior staff?
Shoop:
No. No, it’s a for-profit company.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Shoop:
No, the guy that led it was actually from Canada. IEEE paid them a fairly handsome fee to come in to do that. [1:16:20].
Hellrigel:
Okay. Then out of this, you’re getting ready for, I guess, the first Board of Directors meeting in February?
Shoop:
Right, right. We would come back because this was just the Board. It didn’t include any committees or anything else. So, [1:16:40] we came back and one of the report outs was what we did at the retreat, what’s the game plan, what’s the vision for the year, and those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
Even IEEE staff, we wait to hear what comes out of the retreat and what the Board [1:17:00] decided. Then we get graphics and guidelines about goals, priorities, and whatever they’re going to call them for the next year or so. You’re coming out of this retreat, and your primary focus is going to be industry. Then [1:17:20] at the Board of Directors meeting you’re going to determine any type of ad hoc committees and things like that.
Shoop:
Right. Right. Coming out of the retreat, we also thought about what ad hoc committees would make sense to try to drive the strategic [1:17:40] plan, the strategic direction.
Hellrigel:
You have one year. You’re working more closely with Howard Michel, the Past President at this point. How did you select where you wanted to go? You have first [1:18:00] call on the schedule, so how did you pick your travel plans and things like that?
Shoop:
I’m not sure how I did that. There were obviously a series of places. [1:18:20] One of the items was Young Professionals, and they have an annual meeting. I think that year it may have been in Poland or some place. I was trying to have a diverse impact, so [1:18:40] I think I probably traveled to all of the Region meetings. Again, that was representative of getting to the members in each of the Regions again. I said basically that we tried to do these things as the Vice [1:19:00] President of MGA and now we’re back as the [IEEE] President, and this is what we’re going to do. I selected some of the flagship technical conferences to go to, to talk with the technical leadership of that. I went to Standards Board meetings. I tried to [1:19:20] be as diverse as IEEE is. I tried to make sure that I was, as the face of IEEE, as the President I wanted to be present at each of the elements that were going on within the IEEE.
Hellrigel:
[1:19:40] Did you recall any challenges presiding over these meetings? We’ll start with just the mechanics. The Board of Directors, you’re the President, so you preside over the meeting?
Shoop:
Yes. No, I didn’t have any issues with presiding over the meeting. [1:20:00] If you ask people, even though I’m Army, I run a fairly tight ship, so I always start on time and I drop the gavel exactly – if we start at 8:00 o’clock, the gavel drops at 8:00 o’clock. People know that. People understand that. I try, [1:20:20] with the help of the Secretary, I keep things in line, but I didn’t have any issues the year I was the President with those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]. Your focus is going to be industry, but what does that mean? How did you try to [1:20:40] reinvigorate this relationship?
Shoop:
One of the things that I did, I started this as the President-Elect and continued it as President, we would set up engagements in [1:21:00] geographic areas around the world and then the staff would coordinate and bring industry leaders together. So, we traveled. It wasn’t just me. We would travel with a team of four or five, sometimes six Board members and [1:21:20] maybe the President, maybe the President-Elect, traveling. But we would go to places. My trips, we went to Israel, and they pulled industry representatives together so we would talk to them, or we would go and visit individual industries. [1:21:40] We went to Israel. We’ve been to Japan. Silicon Valley. So, we tried to identify kind of strategic areas.
Again, my experience with MGA was each of the Regions were different, so we shouldn’t expect [1:22:00] that industry, in say Asia, is the same as industry in IBM here in the Mid-Hudson Valley. So, we tried to go out and we would ask questions. We would get feedback and then we would produce reports on that to say here’s what industry is asking [1:22:20] for. How can we now support that? So, it was under my tenure that we started the, and I forget what it’s called now, but it’s now a standing committee. It’s an Industry Engagement Committee. Dejan Milojicic, from HPE in Silicon Valley, [1:22:40] was the first chair of that Ad Hoc Committee and then he became the Chair of the Standing Committee. The Board approved that as a Standing Committee. That it was important enough, so that evolved out of this.
Hellrigel:
I guess the game plan is to highlight the importance [1:23:00] of staying engaged in IEEE for industry and maybe to let their members off for a few days to go to conferences?
Shoop:
Yes, it was part of it. Part of it was raising awareness. [1:23:20] I met with a tremendous number of Presidents and CEOs of companies. Just because of the title being the President of IEEE, it was an opportunity for me to share what IEEE could do and what IEEE was [1:23:40] and then to get feedback and input from them on what their needs are from that perspective. Quite frankly most of their needs did not have to do anything at all with very deep technical conferences. There are large corporations [1:24:00] like HPE that have a research element. IBM has the [T.J.] Watson Research Center, so some of the large corporations have research arms that will in fact engage with IEEE technical societies. But the rank [1:24:20] and file engineer that is doing work doesn’t need those kinds of resources. They need other kinds of resources, so we were trying to identify what those resources were and if there was a way that would provide that.
Hellrigel:
Are the resources then like the workshops? What resources did they need?
Shoop:
Workshops, [1:24:40] mentorship kind of programs, and those kinds of things. Cross-collaboration without intellectual property kinds of issues. They wanted to collaborate with others, but how do you do that without giving away your trade secrets?
Hellrigel:
Right. [1:25:00] The IEEE Standards Association might be a place where industry is the most active?
Shoop:
Exactly, it is, yes.
Hellrigel:
Then maybe you also leaned on the Standards Association people, like Karen Bartleson came out of Standards to get those cross [1:25:20] relationships going.
Shoop:
Exactly. Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing this and these are some of your initiatives. What are some of your successes then?
Shoop:
Well, I think the fact that [1:25:40] the IEEE Board decided that the Industry Engagement Committee was important enough to stand up a full Standing Committee of the Board is a success. It’s kind of like transforming MGA. I think that was clearly one of our successes. [1:26:00] We raised awareness through all of our engagement. I think that IEEE as a professional society, the visibility of IEEE was raised through the work that we did. [1:26:20] That was from the 2016 report, err, yes, the 2016 report to say what we claimed as a success.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I was just interested in what stuck in your mind. But that committee [1:26:40] is certainly a tremendous success. Do your recall anything that you didn’t accomplish that you would have liked to?
Shoop:
Howard had started down this path of trying [1:27:00] to restructure the Board of Directors. As President-Elect, I worked with him and supported that. That we did not get done in his year as President. I agreed to continue that. Then he did [1:27:20] the chairing of that. We were unsuccessful. That was one of the things where we were trying to reduce the size of the Board of Directors. We were trying to make the Board more efficient and more in line with what other, say for-profit, and even other not-for-profit board sizes were. [1:27:40] We put a tremendous amount of effort into it. I think it was called IEEE in 2030, so there was an Ad Hoc Committee and a Committee of that. That was an unsuccessful venture. It ultimately went [1:28:00] to the membership for a vote and the membership voted it down. It took a tremendous amount of time and resources to do that. We weren’t successful with that.
Hellrigel:
Why do you think membership voted it down?
Shoop:
[1:28:20] Perhaps we tried to do it too fast. We tried to be as transparent as we could in the process. We brought onto the committee folks who were against it. They were inside trying to understand, [1:28:40] but it was just probably too much of a change too quickly would be my guess.
Hellrigel:
To restructure the Board to drop it from thirty-one members did you do this to just have shorter meetings [1:29:00] or save some money on travel?
Shoop:
It wasn’t really that. It was trying to make the Board and the organization more effective. I mean if you’re in the tech business, you want to have a certain degree of nimbleness and [1:29:20] to be nimble, a thirty-one-member or thirty-three-member board is kind of stuck in the way it has done business before so that ended up being the result.
Hellrigel:
[1:29:40] You are going to spend the year as IEEE President and then you become Past President.
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you want to add anything about your presidency?
Shoop:
Just the IEEE coin. You had asked the last time.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes, yes. The IEEE Challenge Coin. You seemed to [1:30:00] have it set at least for a few years.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Three people had IEEE Challenge Coins.
Shoop:
Right
Hellrigel:
You, Karen Bartleson, and Jim Jefferies. Why did you introduce the coin?
Shoop:
It comes from a military tradition. As a commander in the military, you have a coin affiliated with your particular [1:30:20] unit. I’ve had coins. My last coin was at West Point as a Department Head. So, the coin is a way to recognize people who contribute to your organization without spending a tremendous amount of money.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Shoop:
The challenge coin [1:30:40] has a very long and deep tradition, so I decided that once I became the [IEEE] President, a challenge coin was something that made sense. So, I actually designed that challenge coin. Then we had it produced. I think the first [1:31:00] challenge coin that I gave out was at the retreat. I gave each of the Board members a challenge coin. It was in anticipation of what they were going to do to support the organization over the following year. But then I used that challenge coin when I traveled the world. I would give it to Section Chairs. [1:31:20] I would give it to people that had contributed and had done things for the IEEE at the local level at the national level, and the Region level.
Hellrigel:
How many of your IEEE Challenge Coins do you think you go through, give away?
Shoop:
Oh, probably, we ordered, and I think we had to go through a second ordering, [1:31:40] so probably I went through 2,000, 2,500?
Hellrigel:
Wow. That’s quite a few. Like you said it means something to you but also, it’s a gift and sometimes people might expect an elaborate gift [1:32:00] so you have the ethics of all of that and so this was straightforward.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
A symbol of you, and a symbol of IEEE.
Shoop:
Right. Right.
Hellrigel:
Then Karen continued it and then Jim Jefferies continued it. Then I’ll have to ask Jim Jefferies’ [1:32:20] successor why they discontinued it.
Shoop:
[Laughing]. Yes.
Hellrigel:
But they made a shift to books.
Shoop:
Books?
Hellrigel:
Yes, two of the recent IEEE Presidents wanted to hand out a book. I don’t know why the decided on a book. How large is your personal collection of Challenge Coins?
Shoop:
Oh, I’ve got several hundred.
Hellrigel:
Okay. I know we’re running a little over. [1:32:40] But you’re going to make this segue then to President Past President.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
How was that year for you?
Shoop:
It was much less stressful [Laughing] than the previous year. Again, the travel fell off quite a bit. But it was a good year because [1:33:00] it was an opportunity to help support Karen, like you had said, the Three Ps with Howard, myself and Karen. I think we built a really good bond together. So, I viewed this as I had my success as the President, [I] [1:33:19] considered [my year a] success. So, I wanted to make sure that she was successful in terms of her year. It was a lot of support for her. I also continued to be a member of the Industry Outreach to make sure that that continued.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]. Then Jim Jefferies comes [1:33:40] in and so he’s part of your Three Ps?
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
That was productive?
Shoop:
It was. It was. Jim’s a gentleman. He comes up almost kind of MGA-ish. He was IEEE USA President and so he was kind of [1:34:00] geographically oriented and came from industry. I don’t think our relationship with me, Karen and Jim was quite as close [of a] bonded as the [previous] year, but it was good. [1:34:20] It was good. We all got along together and there were no issues whatsoever.
Hellrigel:
Oh. You’re going to some milestones. One of my colleagues said to ask you about milestones and history. After all you’re recording your oral history so [1:34:40] do you see any importance of history for IEEE?
Shoop:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean probably one of the reasons why I’m at Cooper Union… I mean Cooper Union was founded in 1859 and has a legacy of history of contributions and I think it’s important. I did do a number of those [IEEE] Milestones as [1:35:00] Past President, President, and President-Elect. I think that it’s important. Every day that I go into Cooper Union, I walk past the [IEEE] Milestone in the Grand Central Terminal. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]
Shoop:
I see that as I walk by that [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
My colleague is going to ask you to take a selfie with the IEEE Milestone plaque. [1:35:20]
Shoop:
Oh. [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
[Laughing] We could put it on the IEEE Milestone webpage on EHTW [Engineering and Technology History Wiki].
Shoop:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
Tom Coughlin has a competition with Brian Berg who’s on the IEEE History Committee and Chair of the IEEE Milestones Subcommittee. He’s out of Oregon. He’s in the computer industry and they’re busting each other’s chops about who gets the most [1:35:40] selfies. [Photographs with IEEE Milestone plaques].
Shoop:
Selfies? Oh, okay. [Laughing]
Hellrigel:
Maybe they will let you enter their competition.
Shoop:
[Laughing].
Hellrigel:
One question. You become an IEEE Fellow and I believe it’s 2012.
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
How did that [1:36:00] impact your career? What did it mean to you? It’s a rare group.
Shoop:
It is. It is. I mean for me; I had been elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2000, and SPIE [Society for International Optics and Photonics] in 2003. [1:36:20] For me, being elected by your peers to Fellow is important. It’s a real recognition from your peers that you’re doing the right kinds of things. For me, IEEE Fellow was even more special because it’s even [1:36:40] more [selective]. It’s one-half-of-one-percent of the membership, so that was a real, I guess an awakening that I had arrived, that I had done the kinds of things that my peers and my profession thought were important to be recognized. [1:37:00] It was a big deal. Then in 2019, I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering which, again, is another one of those national pinnacle kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
You’re rewarded by your [1:37:20] colleagues in many different fields; engineering overall but also optics, SPIE, and IEEE. When you sit back and reflect, are you content with where you’ve come from and where you landed? [1:37:40] If you would say to your younger self, your fifteen-year-old or twenty-year old self, where you’ve gone, how would you sum it up?
Shoop:
I mean, yes, I am. I try not to be a prideful person. [1:38:00] My daughter always has accused me -- you know when I get awards, or I get these Fellow elevations or other kinds of things -- she always accuses me of getting the certificate and throwing it in the bottom drawer of my desk and just kind of moving on. I’m not the kind of person that looks [1:38:20] back a lot. I’m always looking forward to what should I be doing, what could I be doing. But I’ve reflected, I had to reflect when I retired and tried to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I’m pretty happy with where I’ve come from [1:38:40] and what I’ve done. I can’t imagine anything else that I would have done differently.
Hellrigel:
No second thoughts?
Shoop:
No.
Hellrigel:
Paths not taken?
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
If you throw your certificates in the drawer, when you become an IEEE Fellow, you get a plaque. [1:39:00]
Shoop:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Well, is that in your office at the university?
Shoop:
It is. It is. I’ve got my awards on my office wall behind my desk at Cooper Union.
Hellrigel:
You had the same thing at West Point?
Shoop:
I did. Yes. [1:39:20] Yes, I put up the diplomas. I usually put my diplomas up on the wall and then the others, the Fellows and the other awards that I’ve got.
Hellrigel:
Looking forward, what’s your game plan?
Shoop:
[Laughing]. My game plan right now is that I’ve renewed my contract as Dean of Engineering for another [1:39:40] two-and-a-half-years. I have committed to the President of Cooper that I will stay to June of 2026. Part of that is that this year is our ABET record year, so next year ABET will come to re-accredit the four majors that I have [1:40:00] in the School of Engineering. I’ve committed to staying through the final aspect of ABET. The other thing that we’re trying to do, and I just got notification two weeks ago from the President, is we’ve closed the budget gap to begin a fifth major, a computer [1:40:20] science major at Cooper Union.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Shoop:
So, we’re in the planning stages of launching a computer science major. That will put me, I’m sixty-six now, so that’ll put me at about sixty-eight. [1:40:40] I think at that point I think I’m going to try to retire.
Hellrigel:
[Laughing]
Shoop:
There are four primary members of my family: myself, my wife, [Linda,] and I have the two children, Brandon and Aubrey. When we take a vote on if I will retire, [1:41:00] the vote is three to one that I will not retire. You can imagine [Laughing] which ones are voting against me. But my wife and I bought our, hopefully, forever home here in the Hudson Valley. We’re close enough to New York City. She loves operas and museums [1:41:20] and those kinds of things. I’m taking up guitar again. I had learned guitar when I was in high school as a young man. I’m taking that guitar up again and I’m starting to learn to try to grow plants. [1:41:40] Then spending time with the children and the grandchildren. That’s what I’m looking forward to.
Hellrigel:
You can segue into this. Do you think you’d teach part time at Cooper or?
Shoop:
I haven’t really thought through that. Again, I’m [1:42:00] tenured at Cooper, so I could continue on as a faculty member. When I’m in a leadership position like I was as Department Head or now as the Dean, I’ve always been one that tries to leave that position and not circle back in because I don’t [1:42:20] want to be perceived as trying to influence or control. I always tell people that if you have any questions whatsoever, I will be more than happy to share what my thoughts are on it. If you don’t, that’s fine. But I don’t want to be a kind of a helicopter individual just hanging around. [1:42:40] That’s one of the reasons why I may not fold back into the faculty.
Hellrigel:
Right. What are your activities in IEEE now?
Shoop:
They are pretty minimal. I teach [in] the IEEE VoLT Program. [1:43:00] The volunteer leadership training. I teach a block of one-hour workshop or one-hour session once a year. Yes, I think it’s once a year on leadership. I do that. I really stepped back from IEEE when I took this Dean’s role because [1:43:20] I knew that it was going to take a lot of time. It may be something that I may consider reengaging after I retire. There may be some opportunities to do some additional, small IEEE volunteer work.
Hellrigel:
West Point, you retired from there, but are you still active [1:43:40] with them? No?
Shoop:
No. No. I know the Department Head there. He was my Deputy. Sometimes he’ll text me or call me and ask questions about different things. We go to West Point [regularly]. My wife volunteers at the hospital through the Red Cross. [1:44:00] so she goes over there once a week for that. We still go to chapel at West Point [and sing in the choir]. On Sundays we go over there, but in terms of the department and the functioning, we don’t have an active role in that.
Hellrigel:
You do seem content. You’ve had such a variety of aspects of your career and your life. [1:44:20].
Shoop:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Now taking up guitar and plants, at Cooper Union they might accuse you of becoming a laid back, not Type A person anymore.
Shoop:
[Laughing] [1:44:40] Maybe. Maybe.
Hellrigel:
Maybe. I don’t know if there’s anything we did not cover that you intended us to cover?
Shoop:
No, I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered more than I expected to cover [Laughing].
Hellrigel:
Okay. I will get the transcript. I send a digital file out and then I [1:45:00] get it. I’ll review it. Then you can review it and make minor corrections. If there’s a gap in your history or your legacy, I know you’re not prideful, we could do an addendum or do a little short third session. Sometimes it’s hard to tell as we ramble what we’ve missed. [1:45:20] In retrospect, you or your family might think you should add something.
Shoop:
Yes, good point, yes.
Hellrigel:
They probably could add a little bit, [Laughing] and tell you to be a bit less humble. [Laughing]
Shoop:
[Laughing]
Hellrigel:
I truly appreciated this. I met you [1:45:40] shortly after I took this job. It was a true honor to meet you. Karen and Howard, I’ve met through this interviewing process. For me it’s an adventure to see where you’ve come from and where you’ve been. I know that [1:46:00] we at the IEEE History Center truly appreciate you taking your time to help us document your history.
Shoop:
Sure, thank you.
Hellrigel:
I know I’ve run over. I appreciate your patience. Have a good day, Sir.
Shoop:
Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for all you’re doing.
Hellrigel:
You’re welcome. Goodbye, Sir.
Shoop:
Bye. [1:46:20]
