FSB professor emeritus receives William G. Hunter award in statistics
Retired Information Systems and Analytics professor worked to spread statistical quality control
FSB professor emeritus receives William G. Hunter award in statistics
A Farmer School of Business professor emeritus of information systems and analytics has received an award from the (ASQ) for his work in statistics, especially in its use in establishing quality control in businesses.
J. Marcus Jobe is the recipient of the . The award was established by the Statistics Division of the ASQ in 1987 to recognize the many contributions of its founding chair at promoting the use of applied statistics and statistical thinking.
Jobe started teaching at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø in 1984. “I was a graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇø at Iowa State in the statistics department, and an Iowa State University alum was a professor here, Bruce Bowerman. He contacted the Iowa State Statistics Department, said there was a job opening here and asked if anyone would like to apply. So I applied,” Jobe said.
He started out teaching the introductory course in Statistics but created new classes as his career continued. “I started the first experimental design course in business at Miami. And, I started the first data mining course in the business college,” Jobe said. “The ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs were the best part of my job. I had some really talented ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs, and the university had really nice professional development opportunities, which helped me become a better professor and to do better in the classroom.”
Sometimes, Jobe’s classroom wasn’t on campus. “One semester I was invited by the Math department to teach in a master's program at General Electric down in Cincinnati. I was the only business faculty to be part of that,” he said. “I taught the applied statistics and quality control course, and some of my ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs there went on to lead Six Sigma training.”
Jobe also made three trips to Ukraine in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, thanks to a chance meeting on campus that he attributes to divine intervention.
“One day I was there on Bishop Woods Circle, and these two guys were standing there, and I just said, ‘You look like you're from the Soviet Union.’ And they said ‘Yes, we are and we're lost,’ he said. “So, I connected them with the director of international programs and the business school, and the next week, Miami called me and said, ‘Let's have a dinner. We want to explore contacts in Ukraine.’”
“So that's how it began. And I believe, as a Christian, that God directed that,” Jobe said.
That meeting led to a pair of Fulbright Scholar trips to Ukraine and a four-year project in which he taught in Oxford and Kyiv, bringing Ukrainian educators to Ohio to visit businesses and show them how statistical quality control worked.
“My co-author at Iowa State and I, we wrote what they said was the first book on quality control in the Ukrainian language. My former ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs helped me do the translation,” Jobe said. “We got about 1,000 copies authorized by the U.S. State Department, then we went all over Ukraine and gave them to universities free to help get them to put into the curriculum.”
Jobe said he was honored to receive the award. “As I read different accounts of Prof. Hunter’s teaching, consulting and international efforts, I was impressed with his energy level and perseverance. Undoubtedly, he encountered resistance and opposition, yet undaunted, he continued with his mission. His efforts to teach quality improvement methodologies to public school teachers reminded me of my father, a mathematics professor at Oklahoma State, who did something similar with the metric system for public school teachers across Oklahoma,” he said .
Jobe finished his career at Miami in 2013. “My last semester of teaching here, my best ºÚÁÏÉçÇø came up to me at the end of class, and she had a picture that was of her father and her as a baby. And her father was my best ºÚÁÏÉçÇø at that class I taught at GE when she was a baby, and now she was the best ºÚÁÏÉçÇø in the last class that I taught. That was kind of a special thing,” he said. “I'm grateful for every opportunity I had here, and I've had a lot of really good ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs.”
