Engineering grad programs prepare students to contribute

Carnegie Mellon blends engineering with technology innovation and management, or with energy science, technology and policy

Boston University offers programs for those who want to specialize in engineering innovation, MEMS, energy and sustainability, or product design

By Sheryl Rich-Kern
Contributing Editor

Not everyone is ready to head to grad school right after college graduation. Some students need a break from studying. Others want to save money, either to get a jumpstart on life in the real world or to begin paying off student loans.

If grad school is in their future, students should not put it off because they may "forget subjects not relevant to their current job," cautions Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, associate dean for graduate and faculty affairs at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh, PA) college of engineering.

Don't let financial concerns stand in your way, says Jeremiah Mpagazehe, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. He's found that "The majority of engineering PhD programs are completely funded by PhD advisors who apply for research grants from outside agencies, or from PhD fellowships."

Students should look into funding from organizations like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (commonly referred to as GEM), notes Mpagazehe. Working grads should investigate their employers' tuition reimbursement benefits.

Bhagavatula says that engineering students need to weigh a few extra years of study against the obvious financial rewards. He estimates that on average, those with masters degrees receive about $10,000 more in annual salaries than those with only a bachelors. A PhD recipient may receive $15,000 to $20,000 more than that.

Schools offer interdisciplinary options
Some students find traditional engineering discipline boundaries too restrictive, but many graduate programs allow students to engage in interdisciplinary research while taking advanced courses in specific areas. For example, Carnegie Mellon recently introduced masters programs that blend engineering with technology innovation and management, or with energy science, technology and policy.

Other universities have similar multidisciplinary programs, and some that don't require a thesis. For example, Boston University (Boston, MA) recently added four three-course certificate programs for those who want to specialize in engineering innovation, micro-electrical-mechanical systems (MEMS), energy and sustainability, or product design.

Minorities with grad degrees are needed
Ray Mellado is CEO of Great Minds in STEM (greatmindsinstem.org), an organization that inspires underserved students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. He agrees that graduate degrees can enhance a student's career.

However, he points out, many underrepresented students come from impoverished backgrounds, and graduate degrees remain financially out of reach. Scholarships help, he acknowledges, "But students have to think carefully about why they're getting that masters or PhD," he says. "Often that decision for a young person comes after maturing professionally in an industry for a few years."

Mellado refers to an Oxford University study sponsored by IBM that investigates the changing role of graduate engineering degrees in the next twenty years. "A PhD will represent more than an extensive depth of knowledge in a particular subject," he says. "Those with a doctorate will need to share the knowledge they've gained with the next generation. And they'll have the task of understanding how their expertise can help humanity."

An advanced degree not only helps the individual, it leads to worldwide technical advances. To continue that progress, we will need to "draw upon the still untapped power of our largest minority groups," says Mellado.

Jeremiah Mpagazehe: PhD in ME at Carnegie Mellon
Jeremiah Mpagazehe was working in a lucrative mechanical engineering job when he decided to go back to school.

Mpagazehe received his BSME from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. For the next two years he worked at Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, MD) performing finite element and numerical analyses on aircraft structures.

He returned to his alma mater for his 2010 masters and is now a third year PhD student in the school's particle flow and tribology lab, where he collaborates with C. Fred Higgs III, the same professor and advisor he worked with as an undergrad.

"I applied to a few schools," says Mpagazehe, "but decided that the research going on in Professor Higgs' laboratory was too interesting to pass up. So I enrolled in CMU through its direct PhD program."

Tribology, Mpagazehe explains, is the study of friction, lubrication and wear. It explores, for example, how long the gears and bearings of industrial machinery can last, and how engineers can design longer life into parts and materials.

With a fellowship from the NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program (GSRP), Mpagazehe works to investigate how lunar dust erodes the NASA hardware. When spacecraft land on the moon, he explains, rocket exhaust gases agitate the loosely-packed layers of dust on the moon. Because of the lack of significant atmosphere and low lunar gravity, these fast-moving dust particles travel long distances. When they strike nearby lunar hardware, they tend to cause erosion, as occurred with the U.S. Apollo missions.

During the summers of 2010 and 2011, Mpagazehe interned at the NASA Glenn Research Center (Cleveland, OH) where researchers simulate the lunar dust phenomenon with terrestrial dusts, and conduct tests to see how different materials wear out. Mpagazehe was recently notified that his funding will be extended into 2012, so he'll be back for another summer.

At CMU, Mpagazehe writes computational models to predict the interactions among the dust particles, exhaust gases and the lunar hardware.

NASA awarded Mpagazehe his GSRP fellowship in 2009. His advisor's lab also helps fund his tuition and living expenses.

Mpagazehe has been an active member of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which he joined as an undergrad. He helps CMU recruit new students at NSBE national conventions. Looking ahead, Mpagazehe hopes to teach at a university and continue his research in tribology-related fields.

Stephanie Kristine LaCrue: masters in CE at Colorado School of Mines
When you grow up in Denver, CO with the splendor of the Rocky Mountains at your doorstep, you may never want to leave.

In fact, Stephanie LaCrue stayed close by for her 2010 BSCE at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) in nearby Golden. She continued to live at home with her parents and siblings to keep costs down, often sharing a car with her working parents.

LaCrue is the first generation in her family to attend college. For that reason, she says, "Everything was new." Her parents provide emotional support, but "I've had to be more independent," she says. "And I rely on advisors for career guidance."

Beginning the summer before her freshman year, LaCrue interned for five years at the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District (UDFCD, Denver, CO) where she edited ArcGIS maps, researched and documented historical floods of Colorado, and evaluated annual flow and stage peaks of UDFCD drainageways.

LaCrue knew she would eventually pursue a masters in civil engineering. Her advisor, Jahi Simbai, director of graduate recruitment at CSM, encouraged her to apply for funding from the Louis Stokes Colorado Alliance for Minority Participation Bridge to the Doctorate (CO-AMP BD) program.

The CO-AMP program, Simbai explains, enables underrepresented minorities to build on their undergraduate educations.

LaCrue began her research in the spring of 2011, studying the volume change of sand samples with a triaxial testing machine that measures the mechanical properties of deformable solids like sand.

"Most people think sand doesn't have cohesion," says LaCrue. "But even partially saturated sand has an apparent cohesion, causing problems such as settlement." A small increase in cohesion can change the sand's strength and the loads it can bear, affecting building and bridge foundations, retaining walls, dams, and buried pipeline systems.

LaCrue cites the Tower of Pisa as an example: its leaning structure is the result of a problem with unstable soil. If twelfth-century architects had understood soil mechanics like we do today, she explains, we would be without one of the most famous tourist attractions of Europe.

LaCrue expects to complete her masters by the end of 2011 and may pursue a PhD. Most likely, she'll continue to live in the mile-high city where the sun shines 300 days of the year.

Margo Monroe: PhD in biomedical engineering at BU
Margo Monroe is one of only three engineering graduate students at Boston University (BU, Boston, MA) to receive the prestigious Applied Healthcare Engineering Fellowship from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (cimit.org). CIMIT is a consortium of Boston hospitals and universities that advances research in medical device and clinical technology system applications for today's most urgent healthcare problems.

Monroe is working in BU's optical characterization and nanophotonics lab where she's developing a compact, inexpensive, point-of-care calibrated sensing platform for allergy testing. She hopes that in the future, doctors' offices will use the technology to diagnose allergies and medical conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. The device would save time and money by eliminating the need to ship patient samples to outside diagnostic agencies.

Monroe earned her 2008 BS in materials science and engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She decided to pursue a doctorate in biomedical engineering because of her background in materials science, particularly surface modification chemistries and how biological compounds like proteins and DNA interact with surfaces. She's now in her third year at BU in the biomedical engineering department.

As an undergrad, Monroe interned at several research labs. She studied the effects of cartilage formation in myoblasts from extracted bone growth factors at RTI Biologics (Alachua, FL) and surface modification techniques at the Douglas Research Group (Foley, AL).

Despite the icy breezes off the Charles River, Monroe is happy with her move north, but it wasn't easy adjusting to the chilly temperatures.

"I had never worn a winter coat," she claims, "but I chose Boston University anyway because it's a leader in biomedical engineering." It doesn't hurt that Boston is a city rich in medical expertise with numerous teaching hospitals and other research facilities.

Monroe expects to complete her doctorate by 2013 and hopes to work for a point-of-care diagnostic company.

Nimrat Sandhu: PhD in civil and environmental engineering at NJIT
When Nimrat Sandhu was taking high school sociology in Punjab, India, she and her classmates would often visit the nearby towns and villages to plant trees and help with waste cleanup on the roads.

These high school field trips motivated Sandhu to pursue a career that involves preserving the planet. She attended Punjab Agricultural University (Ludhiana, India) where she received her 2006 bachelors in agricultural engineering.

As an undergrad taking courses in water resources and waste management, Sandhu decided to turn her attention to environmental engineering and completed her masters two years later at the Punjab Engineering College (Deemed University) in Chandigarh, India.

As in most traditional middle-class families in India, Sandhu's parents financed her education. But she didn't expect them to fund a doctoral program in the United States, which is dramatically more expensive.

When the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT, Newark, NJ) accepted her application into its PhD program with full financial support, Sandhu enthusiastically accepted. Since her arrival, she's been working with the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) investigating the impact of metals and metalloids such as arsenic, lead and antimony in highway-marking glass beads.

These glass beads are critical for safety in nighttime, rainy or foggy driving conditions because of their retro-reflective effect, she explains. That's an optical phenomenon that allows drivers to see the road or highway boundaries and lanes.

Sandhu finished her work with NJDOT in the spring of 2011. For her PhD research, she continues to evaluate ways to quantify these elevated concentrations of metals and metalloids in highway-marking beads. She's studying whether these metals might, over time, leach into the soil from precipitation and de-icing salts, and looking at the effect of changes in the glass bead size.

This summer, Sandhu interned as an environmental engineer with MACTEC (now AMEC, Atlanta, GA), a consulting firm that provides engineering, environmental and construction services to public and private clients worldwide. She worked with public agencies and private clients, coming up with remediation solutions, cleaning up brownfields, and preparing project proposals, remediation investigation reports and bid documents.

"Working in a multinational firm with multidisciplinary teams has been the greatest experience ever. In addition to learning to voice my inputs and expertise, I learned to work in a team and watch my efforts come into effect," she says.

Though she was offered another co-op for the fall, Sandhu decided to focus on finishing her research and her PhD.

Down the road, she envisions working as an environmental engineer in industry and then returning to academia as a professor.

Chris Walton: PhD in ME at MSU's Bagley College of Engineering
Visiting Chris Walton at home, friends would often find him tinkering with cars, whether he was changing oil or spark plugs, or doing a more complex task like taking apart a carburetor or installing stereo equipment.

Walton says he was born a mechanic, but always knew he would develop those skills further, especially since his dad was a chemical engineer. "In high school I participated in the Boosting Engineering Science and Technology (BEST) robotics program and that helped me find a niche in math and science," says Walton. "Mechanical engineering gives me the best opportunity to use my hands-on skills in industry."

Walton earned his 2010 BSME at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayette-ville. He considered grad school, but "Costs were a major factor," he says. Even so, after speaking with several mentors, "I decided to pursue a masters and PhD while the book work was still on my mind." After visits to several universities, he chose Mississippi State.

He applied for multiple fellowships and has been named a 2011-2012 GEM Fellow, sponsored by the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science and Corning Inc (Corning, NY). He also received honorable mention in the 2011 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program.

Walton is now a PhD student in ME at Mississippi State University's Bagley College of Engineering. He works as a research assistant at the school's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems where he's focusing on the chemo-mechanical effects on magnesium alloys: lightweight metallic alloys with low density, high mechanical stiffness, excellent specific tensile strength and vibration absorption. Over the next couple of years, Walton will conduct corrosion experiments with the alloys in two saltwater environments: cyclic spray and immersion.

As part of his GEM Fellowship, Walton interned in the summer of 2011 at Corning in northern New York state.

An active community leader and volunteer, he was president of the Student African American Brotherhood at UA. At Mississippi State, he frequently tutors and mentors secondary students in the Mississippi area.

Walton expects to complete his doctorate in 2015 and then work as a research engineer. "While working in industry," he says, "I hope to give back through academic programs and contribute to my local community in any way possible."

Laura-Ann Chin: masters in ChE at Villanova
In the summer of 2008, Laura-Ann Chin spent a semester in Aachen, Germany as a research assistant at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, where, among other tasks, she investigated a continuously-operated shaken bioreactor system to study the genetic stability and wall growth of E-coli.

What Chin remembers most about German culture is how much people cared for their environment, whether it was choosing to walk rather than drive, washing out glass water bottles for reuse, or taking the time to separate a popsicle stick from its wrapper in the trash.

"I had never taken recycling seriously until I went to Germany," says Chin. "The experience had a huge impact on me."

Chin is in her second year of a masters program in chemical engineering with a concentration in sustainable engineering at Villanova University (Villanova, PA). She has a full tuition scholarship and expects to finish by May 2012. Chin graduated in 2010 from the University of Arizona in Tucson with a BSChE.

Chin grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and moved to Tucson to live with her aunt and uncle as a high school junior. In addition to the semester in Germany, she spent six months at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia, where she investigated video and image processing capabilities of Simulink's MATLAB software to design a tracking system for medical research.

Chin observes that some renewable alternatives like solar, wind and geo-thermal, are geography-specific: "We don't have sun every day. And wind doesn't blow all the time. On the other hand, biomass is everywhere."

For that reason, Chin has chosen to research the conversion of biomass to biofuels from trash produced from non-food crops or inedible waste. "Second-generation biofuel is beneficial as a promising energy carrier for the future," she explains. "Also, it doesn't compete with the food industry."

Chin is part of a biomass conversion and research technologies team at Villanova that focuses on conversion of biodegradable waste materials, like spent mushroom substrate and paper mill residue, to biofuels.

Outreach is important to Chin. As an undergrad, she was president of her school's Society of Women Engineers student chapter. About once a month she visits elementary and high school students through Villanova's new NovaCANE program to get them excited about the field of engineering. She recalls one recent trip where she held a chemistry cooking demonstration, mixing cream, vanilla and sugar to make ice cream with liquid nitrogen. "That was a big hit," she says with a laugh.

Ninrat Datiri: PhD in EE at Tufts
Ninrat Datiri is the first GEM Fellow at Tufts University (Medford, MA).

At Tufts, the Graduate and Professional Student Admissions Recruitment Committee (GAPSARC), a university-wide committee of Tufts administrators and faculty, has worked since 2004 to recruit graduate and professional students from underrepresented groups. It was through the efforts of the committee and his advisor that Datiri came to Tufts School of Engineering in 2010 for his PhD in EE.

"Ninrat is an extraordinary person, both personally and professionally," says his advisor, associate professor Valencia Joyner, who conducts research on the design of high performance, low power systems with applications in biomedical imaging and optical wireless devices. "His motivation, his intellect and his ability to think creatively made him the ideal candidate for pursuing research in my lab."

Under Joyner's guidance, Datiri's doctoral research will focus on VLSI: 3D integrated circuits and optoelectronic system-on-chip modeling and integration for applications in optical wireless communication and biomedical imaging.

Intel is sponsoring Datiri's GEM fellowship, which required him to intern at the company for a summer during his PhD program. From June 2010 to January 2011, Datiri interned at Intel's Hudson, MA site as a graduate design automation and validation co-op engineer on the design automation tool team. His work involved resolving CAD tool performance issues in next-generation Itanium and Xeon server microprocessor projects.

Datiri was always interested in math and science. He attended the Alabama School of Mathematics and Sciences (Mobile, AL), a public, college preparatory residential school four hours from his hometown. As a young student, he wanted to be an inventor. "But I didn't see an 'inventing' major in any college handbooks," he says with a smile. "I chose engineering so I could invent cost-effective solutions to problems."

He earned his 2007 BSEE at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his 2010 masters in computer engineering at North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC). Datiri was also a GEM masters Fellow with sponsorship from Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA). He worked at HP for four consecutive summers as an ASIC design co-op engineer in Ft Collins, CO and Richardson, TX.

Professional networking and support have been important for Datiri. As an Intel intern, he participated in the Network of Intel African American Employees, the New-Hire Network, the Intel Developer Forum and more.

He's a former president of the Wisconsin Black Engineering Student Society. From 2007 to 2009, he chaired the telecommunications committee for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), where he helped develop a smartphone app to provide updates for its 2011 national convention.

You don't see many African Americans in engineering, Datiri observes, "But the ones you do meet are helpful to others." He emphasizes that his time with NSBE "helped me to network where I'm trying to go."

Datiri subscribes to the philosophy of a modern African proverb: "When you take the elevator to go up, you always must remember to send it back down." He encourages young engineers from underrepresented minorities to not only use the positive insights they get from others, but to share that wisdom with the next generation.

Fatou Diagne: PhD in environmental engineering at Howard
Originally from Senegal, Africa, Fatou Diagne appreciates living in a part of the United States where she can get on the metro, DC's transit system, and not feel so far away from home. Sometimes she'll even hear people speaking Wolof, her native language.

We are living in an interconnected, global world, she explains, and she sees evidence of that everywhere, from the diverse international students she hangs out with on campus, to the virtual connections she's made in El Salvador and Honduras through volunteer organizations like Engineers Without Borders (EWB, ewb-usa.org). Diagne serves as secretary of EWB's DC chapter and is in the preliminary stages of managing a wastewater project in Armenia.

Diagne got her BS in civil engineering from Howard University (Washington, DC) in 2006. She worked for a year as a civil engineer at Camp, Dresser & McKee (Cambridge, MA), an environmental consulting firm, and then returned to Howard for her 2009 masters.

As a PhD candidate at Howard, she is part of a team investigating the effect of nanoparticles leaching from commercial products, how they age, and their transport and fate in the environment, specifically in wastewater treatment systems.

Diagne receives financial support from the Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), a partnership of Howard, Duke, Virginia Tech and Carnegie Mellon that's funded by the National Science Foundation. "This is a great opportunity for minority students in engineering," she notes.

Previously, Diagne was a research associate in the physico-chemical processes lab of Howard's department of civil and environmental engineering. Her project focused on modifying nano- enabled membrane technologies to alleviate the lack of water in certain regions and improve wastewater treatments.

Diagne is on a mission to improve global access to water and sanitation in a sustainable manner, which is very likely achievable given her ability and experience.

Lydia Ross: masters in engineering management at FIU
Lydia Ross spends all but two Saturdays of the year indoors at the same location: inside a classroom at Florida International University (Pembroke Pines, FL). She is pursuing a professional masters of science in engineering management (MSEM).

Ross graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008 with a BSME. She was one of eight females in a class of almost 120. "I'm used to that," says Ross, who was the first female to join her high school wrestling team in Bridgeport, WV. "I can't let the guys have all the fun," she laughs.

Since graduation, Ross has worked her way up to engineering supervisor at the Fort Lauderdale, FL office of Groundwater and Environmental Services (GES, Tulsa, OK) where she also interned as an undergrad. GES provides a full range of environmental services, from assessment through closure, for clients who face a range of soil and groundwater contamination problems. In her current position, she designs remediation systems, writes technical reports, interfaces with regulatory agencies, manages a staff of engineers and technicians, and stewards the health and safety program.

One of the more rewarding aspects of Ross's job is the opportunity to communicate advanced technical concepts to someone without a technical background. "I'm challenged when a particular site requires me to explain a technology that one of the parties may not be familiar with," she says. For example, she may have to explain that "surfactant-enhanced groundwater extraction" is basically "injecting a fancy biodegradable, non-toxic soap into the subsurface before extracting petroleum-contaminated water."

Ross had considered going back to school for an MBA or a masters in engineering, but neither was the right fit. Unlike other management programs, the MSEM degree combines business, law and engineering to prepare technology professionals for managerial and entrepreneurial careers.

"When I heard about MSEM at FIU, it seemed like it would cover the material I needed to foster my technical management skills," she says.

She was also glad that she could finish the degree in one year, without quitting her job. Ross didn't want to lose her professional traction in the workplace: "I have developed strong relationships with all my clients, subcontractors, regulators and coworkers and I was unwilling to give that up."

Engineering taught Ross how to analyze problems. Now she wants to leverage those skills for a managerial position where she can develop staff and interface with clients while getting people excited about new technologies.

Alice Squires: PhD graduate in systems engineering at Stevens
Dr Alice Squires has been teaching technology management, business and systems engineering courses at universities for nearly a decade. She's also been working in industry for nearly thirty years, employed as a consultant with Assett, Inc (Manassas, VA) on projects for Lockheed Martin, IBM and EDO Ceramics; as a senior engineering manager for General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin; and as an advisory engineer/scientist for IBM.

Squires received her 1984 BSEE from the University of Maryland (College Park, MD) and her 1996 MBA from George Mason University (Fairfax, VA). She was awarded her doctorate in systems engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in May 2011.

Through her professional associations at ASSETT, Squires was recruited to teach online grad courses in systems engineering at Stevens. In 2005, she left the corporate world to pursue her doctorate.

"I discovered that academia gives you more flexibility to investigate technologies that interest you," explains Squires. "You can define your own path."

For her doctorate, Squires began evaluating the effectiveness of online education in teaching systems engineering competency. What knowledge and skills do systems engineers require for the workforce? Can they learn in a remote environment?

Although Squires is studying online curricula, she believes that "The framework I have developed can be extended to any modality of education."

In addition to her doctoral work, Squires is a senior researcher for Stevens on the American Society for Engineering Education's "Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering" and "Systems Engineering Experience Accelerator" projects.

She's building an educational knowledge base to help systems engineers mature from novices to experts. "I'd like to shorten that cycle by providing a simulation of experiences," she explains, "those 'aha' moments when there is an important lesson learned."

Squires admits that raising a family while working full time and pursuing a doctorate has been a struggle at times, but she believes her experience has had a positive influence on her children's attitudes towards education. "My youngest was in middle school when I began," she says. "Now he's a young man."

With her doctorate complete, Squires expects to direct research programs and continue teaching part time, primarily online.

D/C

Sheryl Rich-Kern is a freelancer in Nashua, NH, and a correspondent for NH Public Radio.

Back to Top