Destination: The Future
AN INITIATIVE TO ELEVATE USC ENGINEERING

The Brightest and the Best
Challenging Students are a Challenge for the School

“These are very talented kids,” says Yannis Yortsos, senior associate dean for academic affairs. “The challenge is to keep them engaged.”

The Undergraduate Curriculum Revision Task Force, consisting of senior administrators, faculty representatives from each department and student representatives, met throughout the 2001-02 academic year before submitting recommendations to Dean C.L. Max Nikias last summer. The school and its departments are currently setting priorities and determining how best to implement the recommendations.

Among the changes being considered:

• Reducing the number of required courses so that students can make more choices in their programs, including being able to complete a minor outside of engineering.
  
• Adding a new biology course for engineers.
  
• Radically restructuring introductory courses to give freshmen more hands-on experience.
  
• Enhancing instructional laboratories and developing methods of instruction that depart from the traditional lecture format.
  
• Working with the math and physics departments in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to develop curricula that are more relevant to engineering students.
  
• Developing freshman “academies” – cohorts of students who would take required courses together and meet regularly for one-unit seminars, led by each academy’s faculty mentor, on topics such as ethics, contemporary engineering and technology.

Freshman Aaron Pipkin, a Presidential Scholarship awardee majoring in electrical engineering, loves music; he was drawn to USC in part by the opportunity to combine electrical engineering with courses in music recording. His freshman colleague, Pamela Fox, has been programming computers since the sixth grade, but hasn’t neglected other interests. The Trustee Scholar and Merit Research Award recipient chose to enroll at the School not only because she was attracted to computer science, but also for the wide array of opportunities across the campus. “Sometimes I don’t even consider myself an engineer because I have so many other interests,” says Fox, who is weighing minors in fine arts and Spanish.

One of the major purposes in revising the curriculum is to free up units so that students such as Fox and Pipkin can pursue any of the campus’ more than 100 minors as a way to enrich their education, add value to their degree and gain experience from the interdisciplinary collaborations that are increasingly important in the engineering profession. “The way our curriculum is currently structured, students have very little room for anything other than engineering coursework,” says Louise Yates, associate dean for student affairs and admissions, and a member of the task force. “Our brightest students tend to be the ones who want more – they want to learn a foreign language or do a minor in international relations to understand world affairs, for example. So our departments are looking at which courses are absolutely necessary and which can be offered as electives rather than requirements.”

The School is also reviewing its own offerings of minors in an effort to replace those not attracting students with more appealing new ones. Only three of the eight existing engineering minors have consistently drawn well: Interactive Multimedia, Multimedia and Creative Technologies, and Web Technology and Applications. New minors have been proposed in bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, engineering management, technology for non-engineers and computer science for non-computer scientists.

While departments are looking to reduce requirements to give students more flexibility, they are also making room for a new required course in engineering biology. “In the future, more and more industrial activity will be in the area of bioengineering,” says task force member Yortsos, who is developing the course. “The departments agree on the need for a course that addresses modern biology in the context of engineering applications.”

Additional efforts are focused on revising the sequence and content of required courses in math and physics, which are taught in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “We need to work with the math and physics departments to establish a better connection between what our students are learning there and the engineering coursework they’re taking here,” says Yortsos, who has initiated such discussions.

But the school is also intent on revising its own introductory courses, mindful that today’s students respond better to action-oriented, hands-on experiences than to the traditional lecture format. Departments are being encouraged to stress laboratory experience, information technology, interaction and problem-solving modalities, as well as “out of the box” thinking in restructuring introductory courses so that they are more appealing and convey a clearer concept of what it means to be an engineer.

“These kids enter the university with the sense that engineering is about getting together, designing something, building it, tearing it apart,” says Yates. “They come in and it’s mostly lecture for the first two years. We need to capture their attention early so that they don’t begin to question whether they’re in the right place.”

“Students today are very sophisticated,” adds Yortsos. “They want to see real-world applications – how what they’re learning fits into the big picture.”

Sam Bagwell chose USC over other engineering schools because of its strength and flexibility. “I didn’t want to become a number, another face in a crowd,” he says. As a freshman, he has already enjoyed personal attention through his participation in the MERIT research program, working in a signal processing laboratory with Antonio Ortega, associate professor of electrical engineering. Nick Danziger enrolled with the intent of majoring in engineering and minoring in business. In his first year, he has already built an autonomous LEGO robot and served as drumline cymbal player in the USC Trojan Marching Band; he is also interested in speaking to visiting high school seniors and helping with recruitment as a member of the Engineering Student Council.

Their interests and pursuits illustrate the niche that has helped USC’s engineering school attract such a high-caliber freshman class: the ability to offer a broader, more well-rounded education than a more specialized campus such as Caltech, while providing more personal attention than can be afforded at larger campuses such as those in the University of California system.

“Our students want to learn about more than just engineering,” says Yates. “They’re very service-oriented.”

Yates also believes that, while today’s students are better prepared academically than ever before, many have little notion of what engineering is about. “They don’t realize that engineering gives you a skill set, a way to think about problems and look at things analytically that can open up so many career possibilities,” she says. “They have this sense that all engineers sit around in cubicles, never talking to anybody else other than engineers.” With that in mind, the school is piloting a program this spring to bring in working engineers to discuss their careers. “This will help our students gain exposure to how fun and exciting engineering can be,” Yates explains.

The school also hopes that the creation of eight freshman academies, each with approximately 50 students, will improve retention. The first academy will be implemented on a pilot basis beginning this fall. “One of the things we felt was missing was the human equation,” says Jerry Mendel, professor of electrical engineering and a member of the task force. “This will help to develop a sense of community within the student cohorts.”

The bottom line in all of the curricular changes, Mendel contends, is to live up to the expectations of a high-quality group of students. “If you have bright students as we do, it means you can raise the level at which you present the material,” he says. “It means we can have important discussion and bring research and more advanced concepts into the classroom.”

Yortsos believes the curricular changes will both capture the interest of the new students and give them the well-rounded education that will prepare them for a wide variety of careers, including leadership positions. “If you read the literature about engineering education, and hear comments from employers, you know that there is a need to change things,” he says. “We are confident that when we make the necessary changes, it will serve our students well.”