"Laid Back" and "Really Cool": Despite High Marks, Biosystems Associate Professor Says
Teaching is a Challenge

By Jamie Creamer

Tim McDonald feels like he ought to apologize to any biosystems engineering alums out there who were in his fall 2002 mechanical power for biosystems class at Auburn University.

After nearly 20 years of working for the U.S. government as an agricultural research engineer, McDonald was teaching his first class ever.

"I was rigid and stiff, and, whew, I must have been really boring," McDonald recalls. "And when I gave my first test, it was a one-hour class, but people were working on that test for three and four hours—and every person failed."

He's come a long way in a short time. Fast-forward to today, when students give him high marks. He's "really cool and very helpful," offers "a fun class" and is "really laid back," reviewers on ratemyprofessor.com say, with one student noting, "If you're a biosystems engineering major, take this guy for everything you can."

With the modest, aw-shucks attitude typical of the associate professor, he downplays such remarks—"they're probably just saying that because I'm too easy," he says—and gives full credit to others for any transformations in his teaching abilities.

"I harken back a lot to my college days and some of my favorite professors and what I remember from them, but mostly, I've watched others in the department here—because, by golly, we've got a terrific department," McDonald says. "They've shared lots of secrets and, most of all, taught me how to relax."

Part of it, too, has to be McDonald's genuine enjoyment of all things biosystems engineering–related. That he is in his element is evident even as he talks about his chosen profession.

"For me, I cannot imagine being in anything else," McDonald says. "No matter what area of research I'm working in, it's all great."

McDonald, a South Carolina native, declared physics as his major when he enrolled as a freshman at Clemson University in 1977. But he wasn't long for that curriculum.

"I decided that a physics degree wasn't practicalwhat would I do with it?—and about that time I met a guy in ag engineering, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of that," McDonald says. "I liked how it combined my two favorite subjects, math and biology, and how broad it was—how you could work with anything from animal housing to bioprocessing."

After earning his bachelor's degree, McDonald, who was a (not very, he says) competitive cyclist, worked for a while in a bicycle shop in Clemson, but then he got married and decided it was time to get more serious about his future. He got his master's in agricultural engineering from Clemson in 1984, then went to work as a general engineer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, or ARS, at its Soil Erosion Research Laboratory in West Lafayette, Ind.

While there, he earned his Ph.D. at Purdue University.

In 1987, he landed an ag engineering position at the Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center out in Clay Center, Neb., and moved his wife and four children to the nation's heartland.

"That position involved research in animal housing and things like measuring feed intake behavior and beef quality, and I really loved all of that," McDonald says. "That was a great job."

But five years of living halfway across the country from South Carolina was long enough for wife Deborah, so McDonald began searching for positions back in the southeast. He wound up in Auburn, working this time as a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service's Forest Operations Research Unit here, investigating "anything relative to mechanical operations in the woods."

"That was another great experience," he says, and he would have been happy to remain, but in 2001, talks of USDA budget cuts led to rumors that the Auburn lab could be targeted for closure (something that never occurred).

About that same time, CoAg's Department of Biosystems Engineering posted a job for a forest engineering faculty position with both research and teaching responsibilities.

"The job appealed to me because it didn't involve a move and because of the previous research I had enjoyed doing with faculty in the department, but the thought of teaching was pretty scary," McDonald says. And that has proved to be perhaps the biggest challenge of his career.

"It has been a totally different way of doing things for me," McDonald says. "I was used to going to work every day with specific goals in mind for what I would accomplish, and then getting that done. My life was really structured.

"With teaching, it's anything but structured," he says. "Students are coming in and out all day, and you've got to be there to help them."

His two main areas of research at Auburn involve maintenance of off-road-vehicle trails—a subject right up the dirt-bike enthusiast's alley—and precision forestry.

In that latter area, McDonald has developed instrumentation to measure the position and size of trees as they are cut, automated methods to map site disturbance from forest harvesting machinery, and he has worked with other faculty to create ways of applying geographic positioning systems to the management of forest harvesting equipment.

As for teaching, in addition to the mechanical power for biosystems class, he also teaches an introduction to biosystems engineering class, a hydraulic control systems class and, a favorite of his, an independent study class for the department's quarter-scale tractor team. In that class, students focus on actually designing the tractor.

"They all like to build, but they don't like the design part," McDonald says. "That's a concern of the industry today, that engineers are entering the workforce with little true design experience. This class gives them that in a fun and competitive environment.”

"Our goal (in biosystems engineering) is to produce competent engineers, so that when they leave here, they can be handed an engineering problem and apply their skills to formulate a solution," he says.

"Teaching's still a struggle for me—you've got to be able to solve the problems you assign, and I have been wrong on my solutions before—but it's more rewarding than I ever would've thought it would be."

In any down time he has, McDonald enjoys dirt-biking—most often at the Talladega National Forest's Kentuck Trails, where his off-road-vehicle-trail research is located—as well as Braves baseball, what he calls shade-tree mechanics and messing around with rubber band–powered airplanes.

"My dad's always been a tinkerer, and I guess I'm one, too," he says.

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