Engineering School revamps curriculum

Engineering School officials have revamped the undergraduate curriculum in order to make it more accessible to freshmen and non-majors, according to Engineering Dean Gregory Farrington. For the first time, Engineering freshmen will have the opportunity to take classes in the School of Engineering and Applied Science that had formerly been limited to upperclassmen. Before, the number of Engineering courses available to underclassmen was severely limited -- and in many cases, Engineering students were encouraged to take only fundamental science classes during their freshman year. Underclassmen will also be encouraged to embark on research projects earlier, Farrington said. "We want to get freshmen linked to their career studies," he said. "[We are offering] richer, more effective and more varied research experiences." Engineering Associate Undergraduate Dean David Pope added the new research experiences will enable students to meet more faculty members. In addition, several new courses in the Engineering School are aimed specifically at underclassmen and students in the other three undergraduate schools. This change is part of a department-wide effort to introduce students to engineering at an earlier point in their education, according to Pope. "We will be offering our own students a new course where students do experiments to deduce physical laws," he added. This course will be called "Discovery-Oriented Lab" and will probably be available in the spring semester. "Outreach courses" are aimed at attracting students from outside the Engineering School. For example, "Perspectives on Energy and the Environment," teaches practical engineering to non-majors. And "Technology and Business," a survey Management and Technology course, is being offered by the Materials Science and Engineering department. Both of these courses have no pre-requisites and fulfill the Formal Reasoning and Analysis General Requirement for College students. Pope said these courses would be valuable as electives for non-Engineering majors. "Everyone who takes a literature course isn't planning on majoring in literature," he said. "I would like engineering courses to be accessible to people throughout the University." Another aim is to encourage all its students to study abroad at some point in their college career. In keeping with the general trend of introducing students to engineering earlier, Pope said he is strongly recommending that students study abroad in their sophomore year, rather than when they are juniors. "We are bombarding freshmen with information about study abroad programs," he said. In addition, the department will be "building up a number of industrial research internships," according to Farrington. The trend to expose underclassmen to engineering continues with changes made in the senior design project, a final project which all engineering students must complete in order to graduate. In past years, students did their work in the fall and spring semesters of their senior year. Currently, many departments are pushing the starting time back to the junior year.