Early Life and Education
Shea was born and grew up in the Bronx, New York, the eldest son in a working-class Irish Catholic family. His father worked as a mechanic on the New York subways. As a child, Shea had no interest in engineering; he was a good runner and hoped to become a professional athlete. He attended a Catholic high school and graduated when he was only sixteen.
On graduating in 1943, Shea enlisted in the Navy and enrolled in a program that would put him through college. He began his studies at Dartmouth College, later moving to MIT and finally to the University of Michigan, where he would remain until he earned his doctorate in 1955. In 1946, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. Shea went on to earn a MSc (1950) and a Ph.D. (1955) in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Michigan. While obtaining his doctorate, Shea found the time to teach at the university and to hold down a job at Bell Labs.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Francis Shea
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion
Larger than in life they managed—
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)