Georgia Institute of Technology School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Serial entrepreneur and sewing-automation leader K.P. Reddy is IndustryWeek magazine’s Manufacturing Leader of the Week for June 6-12. Reddy, who earned his Georgia Tech civil engineering degree in 1994, is CEO of SoftWear Automation, a startup that is reinventing the sewing automation process using robots and machine vision.

When Philip Sarris finished his civil engineering degree at Georgia Tech, he already had a job waiting. Actually, in many ways, he had two jobs waiting. One was with Southern Railway, where Sarris had worked as a co-op student throughout his time at Tech. The other was with the United States Army, which drafted him and sent him off to Korea. All of that meant Sarris didn’t cross the stage and officially collect his diploma in 1952.

This month, Daniella Remolina started work at one of the world’s largest consulting firms, the Boston Consulting Group. It’s an unexpected, but certainly welcome, turn of events for Remolina, who finished an internship with the company and her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in December.

Luck seems antithetical to engineering. There are no equations, statistics or models for luck — there is no control. But to Wick Moorman, BSCE 1975, the recently retired chairman and CEO of railroad company Norfolk Southern, luck matters. It has, he insists, been a central force of his career.