Helmut Thielsch receives M. Eng. award 54 years after attending Lehigh.

Back in the 1940s, when he attended graduate school at Lehigh, Helmut Thielsch was possessed of a fierce desire to learn.

The lone microscope in the department of metallurgical engineering was locked away each night, but Thielsch made his way into the room by climbing around a transom over the door.

The metallurgy professors did not share his passion for crystals, or the various shapes they can be induced to form depending on the rates at which they cool. But Thielsch found time to investigate solidification structures on his own, even as he juggled several part-time jobs with his courses.

Throughout his life, Thielsch never lost the conviction that he could do whatever he set his mind to. After graduate school, he worked 31 years as a metallurgical engineer for Grinnell, becoming vice president of research, development and engineering. In 1984, when he was 62, he founded Thielsch Engineering Inc., a small metallurgy and failure-analysis firm in Rhode Island. In the next 18 years, he added engineering services divisions in environmental engineering, papers and processing, utilities engineering, energy efficiency and more.

Today, Thielsch is approaching 81. His company employs 350 people and annual sales have hit $45 million. He has retained a board of advisers to help him reach $100 million. If he stays healthy, he will work till he’s 90.

One solitary regret cast a lengthening shadow over Thielsch’s professional accomplishments – until last month.

Thielsch never formally completed his master’s of metallurgical engineering at Lehigh. In 1949, with little money, he left Lehigh to take a job with Lukens Steel Co. in Coatesville, Pa. He had earned 27 credits of coursework, earning all A’s and B’s, and he had earned nine credits of thesis research, but he had not completed his thesis paper.

“I always have regretted not to have received a degree from the Lehigh which I held at that time and continue to hold in high esteem as one of the leading universities in metallurgical engineering field in the United States,” Thielsch wrote in a letter to Mohamed El-Aasser, dean of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Thielsch did not formally petition Lehigh to grant him a degree; in fact, he spent most of his letter to El-Aasser discussing his work with crystal shapes and the crystallization of salts and metals.

But El-Aasser and G. Slade Cargill, chair of the materials science and engineering department (successor to the metallurgical engineering department), recommended that the university award Thielsch a long overdue master’s of engineering in metallurgical engineering.

Together with the MS&E faculty, the two decided that Thielsch’s academic record since leaving Lehigh, which includes 250 published technical papers and a book titled Defects and Failures in Pressure Vessels and Piping, more than qualified him for a diploma.

Illness prevented Thielsch from attending winter commencement on Jan. 12, so, on Jan. 21, Cargill flew to Rhode Island to hand Lehigh’s newest alumnus his diploma.

“I’m certainly very grateful and I appreciate it tremendously,” Thielsch said. “My years at Lehigh made a major contribution to my career. Lehigh gave me a lot of stimulation to want to learn.”