A VISION FOR SAE'S FUTURE

Longtime GM engineering executive and STEM education supporter Daniel M. Hancock brings a focused approach to his term as SAE International President.

“Vision” and “focus” are two words most closely associated with the field of optometry, but they have had a profound impact on the engineering career of SAE International's 2014 President Daniel M. Hancock. If not for a slight change in his vision as a teenager, Hancock, who went on to serve in multiple leadership roles over the course of 43 years at General Motors, may have seen his career take off in a completely different direction.

“I had a presidential appointment to the Naval Academy in high school, and it was during the Vietnam War, so they wanted most of their Naval Academy graduates to become Navy pilots,” Hancock recalled. “You had to have 20-20 vision uncorrected, and my vision changed at the last minute, and I could no longer qualify physically. I had no other schools planned, but I was able to get an interview at Allison Transmission, a division of GM, and I took a preliminary engineering aptitude test, did well on it, and they accepted me into their co-op program at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University).”