Answers by Katherine Faber
Dear Hope,
Thanks for your question. The greatest thing about being a professor is that I get to work with students AND work in my field of study. In addition to teaching in the classroom, I have a laboratory in which my students and I study new materials and their properties. Although we are not manufacturing and selling these materials, the understanding that we gain and the ideas that we generate can be used by other engineers in industry. Training students is also very satisfying. The questions students raise in class or in the lab often lead to new experiments, which ultimately lead to a better understanding of how materials behave.
For me, this is the best of both worlds.
Katherine Faber