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Columns::September 9, 2002
Academic Affairs coordinator named for UGA at Gwinnett
Criminal justice director is appointed first Saye Professor
Study suggest relationship between fitness levels, risk of hypertension
Dance moves from Education to Arts and Sciences
New year party
Mixed blessings
Hargrett librarian’s job is history
Carl Vinson Institute of Government appoints new associate directors
Kudos
The word on terrorism
Fired up for First Friday
Campus News
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| Degree program specialist Melanie Moss gets books ready to hand out to the largest ever first-year class of engineering majors at the university. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
Shifting gears
Faculty of Engineering welcomes largest first-year class
By Alan Flurry
aflurry@engr.uga.edu
The Faculty of Engineering at UGA welcomed its largest first-year class ever this fall semester. The new class of almost 90
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| Jaya Srivastava (left) and Meridith Myrick are part of the engineering class that has an average GPA of 3.80 and average SAT score of 1250. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
declared majors more than doubled last year’s enrollment. The faculty and staff formally welcomed the new class at Driftmier Engineering Center on Aug. 26.
“The Franklin College advisers have gone to great efforts in making sure unspecified majors know about the UGA engineering program,” says Tim Foutz, undergraduate coordinator of the engineering programs. “And the admissions office has been great at letting high school students know that we have engineering at UGA.”
In the past, he says, one of the greatest obstacles to attracting a first-year class this size has been the traditional low profile of engineering at UGA. But the vision of departing Provost Karen Holbrook and engineering professor Brahm Verma have made that obscurity a thing of the past by creating the Faculty of Engineering, a new university-wide academic unit. The sizeable first-year class is evidence of the collaboration across the university.
With an average GPA of 3.80 and average SAT score of 1250, this year’s class mirrors the diverse interests and expectations of the university at large. The chosen areas of emphasis range from biomedical to environmental engineering and reflect the faculty’s move to a cross-disciplinary approach in engineering education. The strategy is intended to produce engineers who can integrate knowledge pertaining to physics as much as to physiology.
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| The university’s “Introduction to Engineering” class is filled to capacity with 105 students; approximately 25 students enrolled in last year’s class. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
To give first-year students a feel for what engineers do and the skills they must have, Verma begins the first semester with a design project that introduces many areas of engineering and its international dimensions. This year’s project is to design a system for extracting a guinea worm embedded in the skin of African villagers.
Verma says the engineering initiative is intended to move UGA engineering from a program limited by a discipline to an educational experience with a full range of new opportunities.
“In the dynamic environment in which we live, these students must be able to understand problems from a variety of perspectives in order to arrive at the solutions we’ll need,” he says.
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