Russ Pinizzotto arrived at Wentworth in 2009 with big ideas and energy to match. He recently sat down with WIT to reflect on five years of change in academics at the Institute.
1. In an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Wentworth magazine shortly after you were hired, you called yourself a “change agent.” What did you mean by that?
A change agent to me means someone who comes in, sees what’s going on, and then sees where the future might be and makes changes to enable the institution to achieve those goals. I think anyone who is a change agent sees what could be, instead of what is.
2. How has Wentworth changed over the past five years?
We’ve changed just about everything. When it comes to academic programs, we’ve changed the structure—we now have colleges and departments. We’ve made the College of Professional and Continuing Education more of its own independent operation. We’ve started online programs and added graduate programs. We now graduate close to 125 master’s students a year, and that number will be growing. We’ve increased the average SAT scores 
of the incoming class by almost 50 points, which is unbelievable. We’ve started to get national rankings as an engineering school. When people ask what has changed, it’s really been almost everything, as far as academics are concerned.
3. How has your experience as a professor influenced your work as a provost? I think it’s very, very important to understand your students. At many institutions, once you get to a certain level, you don’t teach anymore, and I think you lose contact with the students. The students as they are now are not the students as they were 20 years ago. So if I had not been in a classroom watching these changes in student expectations, behaviors, and preparation, it would all be second-hand. I’m an experimental scientist, not a theoretician, so to me, talking about what the students are like is nothing like being in a classroom and teaching. I still teach every year, because I think it’s important to have direct contact with the students.
4. What is “EPIC learning?”
EPIC [Externally collaborative, Project-based, Interdisciplinary Curricula for learning] really characterizes a lot of things. We want our students to have experience in the real world. We want them to work on projects that are meaningful, not just theoretical, so we stay true to the basic values of the institution. Interdisciplinary work is something they’re going to have to do when they get out into the workplace. You work in interdisciplinary teams—you don’t work by yourself, in general. We want to make sure our curricula reflect that.
5. You’re a musician (vibraphone and drums), an astronomy buff, and a sailor. If you were forced to choose just one of these pursuits, which would it be?
This is a really tough question. I don’t know how I would give up one of these things. If I could only do one, it’s a close call between music and astronomy. My mother says that before I was a year old, I used to sit on the back step on my father’s lap pointing up at the sky saying, “What’s that?” And I started playing music when I was four years old. I guess I would have to choose music over astronomy, but that’s tough. And giving up the sailboat—I don’t know about that, either!
—Caleb Cochran
