ECS Board of Advocates Working GroupECS Graduate Programs

April 24, 2015

Attending: Ken Van Treuren, Greg Hamerly, Randall Jean, Michael Poor, Johnathan Rylander, Jay Battershell, Don McErlean, David Morgan, Harold Rafuse, Steve Smith, and Jim Wiethorn

The breakout session started off with 10 minute presentations by the Graduate Directors - Randall Jean (ECE), Greg Hamerly (CS), and Ken Van Treuren (ME - standing in for Carolyn Skurla who had a class that only she could teach).

Randall gave an overview of the ECE program to include faculty, student composition, and courses added to the program. New faculty have been added as well as new courses to accommodate research areas. Graduate students are predominantly U.S. Citizens for Masters Degrees and mostly foreign nationals for the PhD. Current concerns for the program are funding, capital equipment and recruiting.

Greg gave an overview of the CS program. He showed data to support a resurgence in CS programs at Baylor and across the nation. An update was given on the PhD proposal and its status. Programs being developed are Informatics, information visualization, software engineering, and systems development. Challenges facing CS are the growing undergraduate enrollment, recruiting PhD students, faculty size/student ratio, space and funding.

Ken gave an overview of the ME program, degrees offered, the current faculty, and the rapid growth of students in the ME graduate (and undergraduate) program. GA positions have not kept up with the growth. Weaknesses identified were heavy undergraduate teaching loads, limited faculty numbers, physical space limitations, and recruitment of graduate students. Threats to the program were listed as the change in the USNWR ranking (now PhD granting list), potential diversion from commitment to undergraduate education, and physical space limitations. The USNWR ranking change was a topic for discussion.

A list of other topics for discussion was developed from ideas from the Board and Grad Program presentations:

1. Recruiting – MS and PhD level – difficult2. Strategic hiring3. How to staff courses? Develop courses to support research? Dual credit (grad/ugrad)4. External funding5. Capital equipment (computers for ECE)6. Limiting undergraduate growth in programs (CS to 315 students, Engineering Pre-engineering)7. Faculty size and faculty/student ratio8. Space9. Funding opportunities10. Ambitious research projects11. External collaboration12. Faculty hiring – non-PhD/lecturers

Several ideals were proposed for helping with recruitment and funding based on the experience from the Board. A strategy for new “centers” was proposed that would involve five companies that could contribute around $35,000 each that would have themes that were common and important to the industries involved. This sounded similar to the wireless and microwave symposium that is held by Baylor each spring however it would involve finding sponsors. NSF could be involved with this.

Another ideas was to have a tech conference funded initially through a grant however grow the conference into a money making proposition.

Research with industry was discussed. Baylor should seek more RTDE opportunities acting as the research arm for industry (subcontracting). A discussion was had about some of the issues with OSP support and Baylor legal requirements for intellectual property. Our administration needs to be more technically inclined to understand the issues facing our programs.

It was pointed out that some program managers at NSF question our ability to accomplish the proposed work without a PhD and with the teaching loads required by Baylor faculty.

Another discussion was had about shorter times for Master’s degrees. The discussion was more toward offering/marketing a more professional degree like our Masters of Engineering.

Space or lack thereof was discussed and its impact on the programs. This was more informational and did not reach any conclusions.

Don McErlean gave the report to the Board of Advocates. He summed our discussion up with the word “TRANSITION.” It is difficult to attract great students with the competition of great jobs with high salaries. As we grow our research programs the challenge of grant funding is always present and we need to be creative with approaching industry with proposals. We are encouraged to find areas of interest to industry and pursue them. The growing graduate programs will require new courses and faculty to teach them. As for recruitment, it would prudent to develop relationships with “feeder” schools such as those associated with the Christian Engineering Conference who do not have graduate degrees.