Engineering School offers seminar series

FEBES will allow students to take not-for-credit mini-courses with top Engineering professors. For one of the first times ever, undergraduate students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science will have the opportunity to break away from large lecture halls. Beginning in mid-February, the Engineering School will offer five mini-courses -- each limited to 15 to 20 students -- taught by the school's top professors for no credit. The courses will be similar to the preceptorials offered in the College of Arts and Sciences under the auspices of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education. A five-member division of the Undergraduate Engineering Advisory Board -- which is comprised of 18 undergraduate students who evaluate weaknesses in the Engineering program -- has organized the series of lectures, known as the For Engineers, By Engineers Seminars. Five professors will present seminars, which will range in duration from one to four classes throughout the semester. The courses offered will represent each major in the school. The lectures will be presented by Systems Engineering Professor Nelson Dorny; Computer and Information Science Professor David Farber; Interim Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt, a Chemical Engineering professor; Bioengineering Professor Abraham Noordergraaf and Electrical Engineering Professor Jan Van der Spiegel. Dorny said he wanted to teach students something "more philosophical" in his seminar -- how to think and analyze a variety of concepts apart from the ones in his syllabus. "Many students seem to view their education primarily as an admission ticket to that career, the path to riches," he said. "That is too limited a view.? People change careers, sometimes rather drastically." Dorny said his seminar -- "Your Education -- A Systems View" -- will aim to define educational objectives that are "more meaningful" than career preparation. UEAB Vice President Lou Kolman, an Engineering junior who headed the project, explained that FEBES arose from a need "to increase student-faculty interaction and to give students a chance to meet professors in small classroom settings." He added that the seminars are a means of heightening students' interests in various fields of study and of bringing engineering to life. Other professors will highlight different areas of engineering. Glandt will present a series of lectures entitled "Quackery for Quakers," in which he will discuss examples of "bad science" and "bad technology" -- cases that attempted to violate laws of nature. He explained that the students would "learn how to analyze technology proposals and how to discern what is novel from what is just quackery." Van der Spiegel will present "ENIAC -- From Vacuum Tubes to Microchip." Throughout the past few years, Van der Spiegel and a group of students have significantly shrunk ENIAC -- the first electronic computer, which was built at Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1946 -- by replacing vacuum tubes with microchips. "I will discuss how [ENIAC] has changed the history of computation," Van der Spiegel said. "It was a big milestone in the areas of computation and information processing and a big transition in terms of technology." Farber will hold a series of seminars -- "Technical, Societal and Economic Future of the Internet" -- and Noordergraaf will talk about advances in medicine for cardiovascular disorders in "Our Blood Circulation: Opinions and discoveries from Galenos to U. Penn." Registration for FEBES will begin during the last week of January on the Engineering School's Web site and sessions start as early as mid-February.

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