Engineering School launches new major

Beginning next fall, School of Engineering and Applied Science students will be able to pursue a new major within the Electrical Engineering Department focusing on topics such as the manufacturing, science and technology of computer hardware. Faculty and administrators in the Engineering School approved a new Computer Engineering major at last December's faculty meeting after several months of discussion about the new program. Courses that address topics in the computer engineering field already exist in the Engineering school. But students have not previously been able to graduate with a formal degree in the subject. "Computer engineering is an increasingly large subset of electrical engineering," Engineering Undergraduate Dean John Vohs said. "It just makes sense to allow students to specialize in it." Requirements for the major will include relevant courses already offered in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments, rather than new courses. Current students may transfer into the program starting this fall. The Electrical Engineering Department is not searching for any new faculty members specifically for the Computer Engineering program, said Vohs, who is also a chemical engineering professor. He noted, however, that the department is searching for a professor of telecommunications, who may also teach courses for the new major. Seventy percent of Electrical Engineering students currently choose courses in Computer Engineering and Telecommunications, a field related to Computer Engineering. According to Electrical Engineering Professor Santosh Venkatesh, the department began discussing a possible Computer Engineering program five years ago and has been gearing courses toward the field since then. "In the current marketplace and the way research has evolved, the primary demand is computer hardware and software," he said. While a degree focusing on software was available, no program focused on hardware, Venkatesh added. Faculty members in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments formed a committee last spring to formulate a curriculum that would combine the two areas. The committee collected information from Computer Engineering programs at schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University. A proposal introduced by the committee examining the new major last fall stated that the "lack of an accredited Computer Engineering degree in EE has negatively affected its student enrollment and has put the EE department at Penn at a disadvantage compared to its peer institutions." Engineering sophomore Andrew Hartford, a Computer Science major, said a degree in Computer Engineering is increasingly valuable, as "society today revolves around computers." Hartford added that the top electrical engineering schools in the country already offer computer engineering as a degree, and such a program is "long overdue" at Penn.

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