On first look, Thomas Sullivan may appear like a typical ECE professor at CMU. With denim shorts, a t-shirt and long salt and pepper hair, he always causes a stir when he walks into 18-100 lectures for the first time. Professor Sullivan has been teaching at CMU since 1996, making him a uniting factor among all ECE majors for the past 16 years. As a matter of fact, I met one of Professor Sullivan’s former students at the recent Employment Opportunities Conference. After looking at my curriculum he looked up at me and said, “This looks harder than what Sullivan used to teach when I took the course back in 1993.” Professor Sullivan remains a link between many generations of ECE majors.
“The course has hanged a lot since I took it way back in the 80’s,” Professor Sullivan said. “It is harder now. There was no digital part then, and the ECE department did not offer a couple of courses as core-courses. We were more focused on the analog part of the course.” Though now the course 18-100 does offer an introduction to both the digital and the analog part of Electrical Engineering, Professor Sullivan still favors the hardware side of the course with wires and resistors and capacitors. His famous line is, after all, “Whatever it looks like on the outside, it is all wires and analog beneath.”
Professor Sullivan, apart from being an amazing professor, shares a great interest in music. He is a guitarist for the rock band Monkey-House. Many of us have seen him perform on campus (he’s a popular act during Spring Carnival). “The band has been a long journey for me, something that has been longer than most things,” Professor Sullivan said. Founded in 1990 with 4 members, Monkey-House produced their first cassette in 1992.
Professor Sullivan’s interest in music is reflected in his lectures. He constantly relates course material to guitars and amps in an effort to make it easier to understand the applications of the course in our daily life. His extreme interest in music has been the motivating fact of his career as he pursued the MS in computer music in MIT. Now, as the Head of the Audio Engineering Minor here at CMU, he is pursuing his interest in Audio and Music Signal Processing.
A Steelers Fan, Professor Sullivan is easily approachable after class and in his office. He is always looking to help his students out of their tight situations. He realizes that what he teaches is hard, and he does not want his students to get intimidated by the vastness of the course. He is always ready to help his students. Professor Sullivan’s ability to truly make a difference through engineering is inspiring for the up and coming engineers he teaches.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at CMU chapter.