George Kurz: Professional, Career, and Life Goals (Established in 2001)
STRATEGY: Work primarily with a traditional consulting engineering firm to productively use and improve my skills, maintain professional contacts, and generate most of my income. The remainder of the time will be on my own for teaching, research, and the projects in Ecuador.
- Environmental Protection – Emphasis on area of expertise for municipal sewer system optimization, overflow prevention, and water quality preservation and improvement. This has been a lifelong commitment. Accomplish this by application of my skills at work, volunteer work, research to develop better tools, and teaching.
- Teach Engineers and Operators – Teach sewer rehabilitation strategies, sewer system asset management, sewer hydraulic analysis, sewer flow monitoring design and analysis - to my peers and the next generation of engineers. The priority target audience is municipalities. However, the information will be kept non-proprietary and will be provided openly to all interested parties including competitors. This will be accomplished by writing and presenting technical papers, publishing articles, teaching technical seminars, developing a website, and acting as an expert source for educational forums such as the UCT “RehabZone” and the all day municipal strategy seminar I teach at UCT (http://www.uctonline.com/html/education.html ). This is a professional responsibility to continue the work of my engineering predecessors – whose intellectual contributions sustain my own work.
- Conduct Research – Ongoing research is essential to keep teaching materials current by “mining” data files of “before-after” flow monitoring, and conducting literature reviews. The results of this research are used to identify trends and solutions to improve data analysis. Improved procedures are tested on real-world data. A focus of this work is to identify the most cost-effective strategies for municipal sewer rehabilitation programs to accomplish environmental and public health protection, and preserve (and enhance) the public investment in sewer infrastructure. I am committed to conducting this work on my own time.
- Practice Leader - Earn the reputation as a nationally recognized “Practice Leader” for the above areas. The purpose of this goal is that a good national reputation will give my teaching better creditability and enable me to reach more people. These people can then apply my techniques to improve their sewer systems.
- Income - Earn part of my income from my teaching and technical seminars.
- Conduct Humanitarian Projects – I believe that it is important to act to improve conditions for people in the world. Since 1996, implementation of this goal has focused on my management of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee’s “Companion Diocese” relationship with the Diocese of Litoral in Ecuador. This involves coordination for development of permanent and mobile health clinics, small schools, and church structures. An average of 2-4 hours weekly is needed – in addition to about two weeks of annual travel.
- Antiques Restoration – Restoration of antique clocks, organs and music boxes. I will improve my technical skills. This work will help to preserve our cultural heritage. Additionally, this provides an important creative outlet for me to balance engineering work.
STRATEGY: Work primarily with a traditional consulting engineering firm to productively use and improve my skills, maintain professional contacts, and generate most of my income. The remainder of the time will be on my own for teaching, research, and the projects in Ecuador.