Engineering education

Electrical Apparatus, Dec 2006 by Hoff, Joseph

Tuition-free school for well-rounded engineers

The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., has injected fun into engineering education. It's no surprise, considering that the school has a $450 million endowment and 304 total students.

The school is named for RW. Olin, a manufacturer of ammunition during World War I. Prior to his death in 1951, RW. Olin started a foundation for education. The foundation became a college.

"The foundation wanted to create a school that would reform engineering education," explains Joe Hunter, director of communications.

This is reflected in the curriculum, which attempts to balance business, engineering, and liberal arts-an arrangement dubbed the "Olin Triangle." Reform is also reflected in the fact that there is no tenure for professors. Furthermore, students do not have to pay tuition.

The school offers three degrees: a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a B.S. in engineering. In the latter, a student can choose to concentrate in bioengineering, computing, or material science and systems.

Freshman year, students take a course called "Design Nature," in which they create something from nature-for instance, a beetle. The devices designed by students are intended to mimic nature. second-year students take user-oriented collaborative design, which brings a human element into the course of study. Half of the class might be assigned bartenders; the other half might be assigned nurses. The students will go out to meet these people in order to determine what products will be useful in their lives.

"We feel engineering has to be more than just technical," Hunter concedes. "We think students should have to figure out what will be useful to these people."

Senior year, the training culminates in SCOPE. The school recruits companies, which in turn give out $50,000 for engineers to develop a product that the company needs.

"There have been high-tech fuel cells, robotic farm equipment, and a tuberculosis tester," Hunter says, enumerating just a few of the products. "The tester will diagnose tuberculosis while people are still in the clinic."

Participating companies have included Motorola, PepsiCo, John Deere, Dawn Solar, Nortel, Boston Scientific, and Vision Agribotics. The process begins when the students sign a contract with the company, agreeing to provide a deliverable. Ultimately, the only deliverable is a bound report that includes designs.

"Most companies wanted to renew the contract for a second year," adds Hunter.

After graduating, 25% of graduating seniors went to work for companies such as IBM, Boston Scientific, I-Robot, and Raytheon. Another 33% enrolled in graduate school, with the largest group enrolling at MIT. Other students chose to attend Stanford, Harvard Business School, and Oxford. Still others pursued alternative opportunities, including research and entrepreneurship.

Engineers examine hurricane aftermath

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the National Science Foundation provided funding for a group of experts to travel to New Orleans to examine why the levees failed.

Tom Zimmie, Ph.D., P.E., a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N. Y., was among this group as they looked at miles of levees. They subsequently made models of a levee and subjected it to high G's. A 150 g-ton centrifuge at Rensselaer's Geotechnical Centrifuge Research Center was used by researchers to carefully construct a model to simulate the levee structure of the 17th Street canal amid the conditions of Hurricane Katrina.

"We tried to match stresses for a one foot model and a 100 foot model," explained Zimmie. "In the cases of levees, we increased the water level."

The tests were conducted in a range of 40 to 100 G. In the tests, the group of experts used soil similar to that found in New Orleans. Then, they raised the water slowly and watched it fail.

There were many levee failures around New Orleans. In the majority of instances, the water did not go over the top. At the 17th St. canal and London St. canals, for example, the water did not rise over the top of the levee. In a few places, however, the water did.

The investigation promises to inform public policy for years to come.

Is U.S. losing its standards competitiveness?

In an article in the May 2006 issue of its monthly newsletter, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association posed this question about standardization: Is the U.S. losing a competitive edge?

According to the National Electrical Manufacturers Association publication, the answer is yes.

Four opinions offered by insiders to this decline are: company mergers, acquisitions, and budget reductions; a sharp decline in the number of government technical experts who contribute to private sector standards activity; increased popularity of "consortium standardization methods," in which a handful of like-minded representatives produce a mutually acceptable standard rather than the more disputatious "consensus" method; and lack of attention in engineering education to the standards process.