Responding to industry requests, several departments at Virginia Tech have started to work together to establish a new practice-oriented master's degree. Although our implementation is different, we are following a trend established by MIT (Crawley, et al., 1993, and Penfield,et al., 1993) among others. In the case of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, this type of degree was recommended by a recent outside review of our graduate education program. The program fits within existing guidelines so that no new legislative approval is required. On an individual department basis the addition of many new courses within the available budget would have been impossible. By working together it became possible to add a small number, initially two, to the college program.
The program will take twelve months, as opposed to the usual two years for a Master's degree student supported by an assistantship. We are using a "2 + 2 + 4" course concept. Two common courses will be required of all students regardless of their particular major, two courses will be selected from a list of electives common to students in all majors, and four courses will be selected from a list of courses specific to a particular major. The first common course will be modern engineering design practice. The second course will be professional issues in engineering, and includes legal and business considerations in engineering. The two courses from the list of common electives include existing courses in manufacturing, quality, systems engineering, optimization and business. This list is similar to the list of courses areas required for our design research degree described above.
To complete the program, students from the different departments will do a project together as a team (we are thinking of 4 or 5 member teams) in the final summer. Our plan is for the projects to be based on industry suggestions and to be reviewed by industry.
Details are available on the POMD page.
*This program was originally proposed by the Mechanical, Engineering Science and Mechanics, and Materials Science and Engineering Departments. The Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Department became involved after the initial development work.