Harold Rogler

Professor

“Take advantage of all your instructors’ real world experiences in the classroom. We’ve got a lot of people with a lot of expertise at SMC.”

Harold Rogler is an expert in ‘Heavy Metal.’ But we’re not talking AC/DC here. We’re talking about how you boost huge hunks of steel and alloys to incredible heights. “My first engineering job was working on the engine for the SR-71 [a supersonic spy plane that flies at Mach 3] before the airplane was built,” says Harold, recalling the days when he was at the Air Force Institute of Technology. “And then I got to work on the engine of the Saturn V rockets.” But Harold’s expertise in aerospace engineering quickly turned to a more ‘earthbound’ piece of technology: the computer.

“I spent about 10 years of my life in searching for various forms of wordiness in documents, rooting them out, and then suggesting ways for computers to rewrite the sentence. I personally typed in over 100,000 examples of excess verbiage. That was,” says Harold, a man of carefully chosen words, “interesting.” But after 20 years of running his own computer firm—and with a PhD from Case Western Reserve—Harold decided to trade the drafting table of his engineering career for the chalkboards of SMC.

“I’m teaching Database Theory & Applications here in Computer Science, and I very much enjoy interacting with my students,” he says. “It’s an excellent facility with hundreds of Pentium IIIs. There’s fast hardware and good software. And I try to give my students the benefit of my 20 years of programming experience and managing software. I think I can impart to them what a potential employer is going to be looking for,” he adds. “But I also hope to make them think a little bit.”

For fun—no surprise!—Harold writes about computers. “I generally write my own notes for class use, so we can quickly move away from the books; I’m just never happy with them,” says Harold, always the engineer.

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