Embedded Master’s Students Conduct Highly Relevant Research Using Industry as Their Laboratory

Systems Engineering as a profession emerged from the telecommunications and space programs in the United States in the 1950s. Motivating this emergence was the need for these systems to be safe, reliable, robust, and able to handle unforeseen events. Practicing systems engineers wrote the earliest Systems Engineering literature (Chestnut, 1967; Goode & Machol, 1957), but it took nearly 20 years before academia began to offer explicit Systems Engineering educational opportunities and to produce textbooks. The subsequent literature has dealt not only with technological topics but also with the corresponding impacts on organizations that produce these complex systems. Thus, research on Systems Engineering is still an emerging field. One challenge is that Systems Engineering is context dependent: the practice is dependent on both the engineering domain as well as the organizations and its surroundings. Another challenge is that valuable tacit knowledge remains largely undocumented within the companies and industries. Specifically, research on Systems Engineering implementation and best practices within the oil and gas industry is scarce. This raises questions about how to make this knowledge explicit and how to best apply Systems Engineering in different settings.