Project Management at the South Pole
MET lecturer Alfred Santino uses knowledge gained in the Navy for his administrative sciences courses.
Alfred Santino, a Metropolitan College lecturer in administrative sciences, was in seventh grade when the first plane landed in Antarctica, in 1956. Eight years later, he participated in a similar mission to Antarctica for the Navy.
Santino served four years in the Navy as a petty officer, two of them including October to February missions in Antarctica. For the first, in 1964, Santino was an aircraft electrician for the mission Operation Deep Freeze. But since “anybody can fix a plane,” he says, he became operations coordinator. “I thought planning a whole expedition was the way to do it.”
As operations coordinator, Santino was responsible for running the daily schedule. “I wasn’t the guy that actually did the work. I was the guy calling the shots,” he says. He delegated jobs, such as reheating engines, checking batteries, and preparing survival kits for scientists studying meteorology and oceanography, to other officers.
Santino says he enjoyed combining his technical knowledge with management skills, a concept he stresses to students in his project management courses. “[The mission] couldn’t have been done without a tremendous planning effort to put all the requirements up front,” he says. “In class, we work on leading-edge technology type programs, so we have to plan the best we can for any contingencies that might come up.”
In addition to teaching at MET, Santino works for the Air Force as a civilian project engineer and is vice president of the New England chapter of the Old Antarctic Explorers Association.
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.