Joseph Francis Shea - Early Life and Education

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:

    Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.
    Fred Rogers (20th century)

    We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.
    Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)

    You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.
    Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)