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Engineering/IT Schools

Virginia Business
June 2003

For years the traditional career path of most business executives included the requisite Master’s of Business Administration, or MBA. These days, however, there are hundreds of B-schools churning out thousands of MBA graduates. Recent studies have questioned the return on investment an MBA delivers. And while there’s already a plethora of qualified MBAs in the business world, many professionals are looking at alternative programs as they continue their education.
Today, many executives are gravitating toward specialized Master’s Degree programs, and many schools are preparing programs that focus on technology or highly specialized fields in engineering to accommodate these students. One such facility is Cambridge College in Chesapeake. This satellite school provides a unique Master’s in E-Commerce to small classes of hand-selected executives. The average age of a student in the program is 40 years old and prerequisites include five to 10 years of business experience, a Bachelor’s degree and a working knowledge of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
We spoke with the person who designed the course, Jim Waldman, campus director of Cambridge College. According to Waldman, “We looked around at other Master’s programs and spoke with the business community. We found that for years industries relied on MBAs to fill key management positions. But now those same companies are turning these people away in droves because MBA graduates tend to be fiscally oriented and industries are looking for managers who understand business and how to utilize technology in that business. Our program stresses the transactional side of economics and how technology is a fundamental asset in today’s business world.”

CEOs can hire technical people to perform IT department functions, but what they desperately need is management skills to go along with technical skills — enabling managers to deliver results through both manpower and technology. The foundation for Cambridge’s program is data management, with every student receiving an IBM laptop loaded with the software for each class, including all text materials. Class sizes are limited to 10 students who stay together as a group until graduation. The program takes 18 months to complete and involves night courses and alternating weekends, to fit around the student’s full-time job.

For more specialized studies, Norfolk State University will begin offering Virginia’s first and only degree in optical engineering this fall. The Norfolk-based campus currently offers several engineering programs and optical engineering represents an emerging field with great potential.

According to Professor Christopher Washington, department head for optical engineering at NSU, the program is a bridge between existing studies in opto-electronics and opto-materials. “Optical engineering represents a truly new science and will be the next important technology for telecommunications, computing and medicine.”

Optical engineering deals with fiber optics and their applications on communications devices, medical appliances and sensor-related technology. “Imagine the automobile of the future where a central computer controls most functions of the car, and fiber optic cables speed the information from the brake pad, through the computer and eventually to the brakes. It will take these ultra-fast impulses to make the car react quickly enough.”

Professor Washington and his NSU staff developed the program by researching the few schools that currently offer study in optics. Specifically, they looked at the University of Arizona and the University of Alabama (Huntsville) to find out the essential components needed. What they ended up with is a five-year BS/MS degree program that accelerates the time it would normally take to receive a master’s degree from six years to five. So far Professor Washington has more than 60 student applications for the fall semester.

Eight years ago, Old Dominion University applied for a federal grant to train displaced civil servants as the government embarked on an aggressive plan to close military bases around the country. Through $7 million in federal funds, the ITPro program was born. It was initially set up to train approximately 1,000 people, with only about one third of the training being IT-related. Based on their early training successes, then-president of the University, Jim Cook, declared “we need to stay in this, even without the federal grant.” Cook was a big proponent of economic development in the region and recognized that there was a huge pool of ex-military looking for this type of training.

So he tapped John Gawne, now executive director of the ODU Information Technology Program, to research which skills were in demand in the work force. Gawne spent the better part of his Christmas vacation looking at employment Web sites to find out what companies were looking for. Based on his findings, he put together about a dozen certificate programs to launch ITPro as a self-sustaining entity within the University.

“In five years we have educated more than 2,600 people in the ITPro program, from Microsoft Certified Professionals to Web Masters,” says Gawne. “And even in a down economy, we are still getting people (in the program) who are transitioning to new and exciting careers in technology.”

According to Gawne, the secret of their success has been in listening to their customers — both the potential employers and the students who are looking to boost their career. “Most of our adult students get through a certificate program in a year,” says Gawne. “They are not necessarily looking to leave their employer, just move up in the organization. For instance, we may have a nurse who is tired of working odd shifts so she acquires the appropriate computer skills and goes back to work at the hospital in the IT department.”

Gawne says that the skills in highest demand right now are in the areas of enterprise security and the Certified Security Specialist Program. Normally these types of certifications take several years, but through ITPro a student can get the basics to begin a career in that field. Many ITPro students are minorities and women, with about half coming from the military. The program offers tuition assistance and job placement services.

Established in 1996 under the guidance of Robert J. Mattauch, Ph.D., the VCU School of Engineering has been a leading source of highly trained graduates serving the work force needs of Richmond and central Virginia. Originally offering courses in mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering, the school has rapidly expanded its curricula to include the emerging field of biomedical engineering in connection with the Richmond Biotechnology Research Park.

In June of 1998, two new teaching facilities supporting the School of Engineering were opened totaling 147,000 square feet. The facilities include state-of-the-art student labs, and a high-tech clean room for the fabrication of microelectronic chips, biochips and micro electromechanical systems. These impressive facilities, along with a high-caliber faculty and curriculum, resulted in their induction into the nation’s only honor society for engineering — Tau Beta Pi, which recognizes students of distinguished scholarship and exemplary character. Founded at Lehigh University in 1885, Tau Beta Pi has 233 collegiate chapters in 16 districts and more than 410,000 members.

“The induction process can take up to 20 years but they did it in six,” Tau Beta Pi Executive Director James D. Froula, Ph.D., told an audience of 100 people attending an installation and dedication ceremony at the school earlier this year. “We’re here because VCU’s School of Engineering believes in excellence as a way of life.”

A recent example of a biomedical breakthrough at VCU would be the development of fibrinogen strands. This blood-clotting protein is spun into a strand that is 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Though a technique called “electro-spinning” VCU researchers spray a fibrinogen solution onto a metal target, where an electric field gradually transforms the liquid jet into a dry fiber. The woven product looks and feels like cloth and is readily accepted by the body because it is a natural human protein.

VCU engineering students are also doing advanced research in the area of telemedicine and robotic-assisted surgery. Sensitive robotic equipment is being developed that reacts to human commands but eliminates the slight tremors that accompany movement. Through this sophisticated equipment, surgeons can perform delicate micro surgery, whether they are in the operating room with the patient or from a distance providing valuable surgical skills to rural areas and Third World countries. Other areas of growing importance include bioinformatics, bioengineering and forensic sciences. In fact, VCU recently received a major grant from the National Science Foundation for bioengineering studies — one of only six grants funded in the U.S.
VCU is also heavily involved in several distance-learning programs, where professors work in real time with students though Web-based systems. This new technology is changing the way students and professors interact and making physical location less of an issue. Among its programs currently in place, VCU is teaching a degree in Computer Science to naval officers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren. As Mattauch puts it: “The important thing about these new graduate courses is how the faculty works with the students. In this new digital age, professors are no longer the sage on the stage, but more like the guide on the side, helping students with the curriculum.”

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