ENGINEERING ADVISORY BOARD MEETING AGENDA Thursday, October 9, 2014 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. Opened: 5:06 p.m. ******************Location: President’s Executive Conference Room***************** St. Josephs Hall, 2nd Floor I.
Welcome/Introductions -John Maydonovitch • Welcome: John welcomed our new attendees and a roundtable introduction ensued • Agenda: John went over the EAB agenda and topics to be covered • Announce New Member Hemant Thapar: John briefed EAB on its newest board member.
II.
Dean’s Update -Godfrey Mungal • New Faculty & Staff • Godfrey discussed our newest faculty member; On Shun Pak, who just joined the School of Engineering. We will have 4 new faculty hires coming soon; 2-Bio Engineering department, 1-Computer Engineering, 1- Mechanical Engineering, and former computer engineering faculty member Ron Danielson will be coming back to the COEN dept. from Information Technology, as the former Vice Provost of Information Services and Technology. Ron will resume teaching in the Computer Engineering Department. • Enrollment: Graduate & Undergraduate • Graduate enrollment reflects a 53% increase, 2/3 are international, 75 percent from India, a large percentage are in computer engineering approx. 55% • Undergrad enrollment, 2014 is a big class for us to handle, 273 new freshmen students, declining interest in civil and electrical engineering. Leveling off in mechanical and bio-engineering, however it is booming in our computer engineering department. • Why is this? 1.4 million new jobs will be in computing by 2020; however the bad news is that we will only graduate 400,000 new computing students by then, only 1/3 of the actual demand. This shortfall is affecting most universities in the country. So many new things and products now have computing and technology as its basis, which puts a greater demand to have skilled labor to create and update these technologies and devices. • QUE: What are we doing to capitalize on this computer engineering student demand? ANS: Computer engineering will now be hiring two new tenure-track faculty and we have hired two addition academic
year lecturers for computer engineering. Computer Engineering is also adding many, many, additional COEN classes to accommodate the huge increase in demand for certain computer engineering courses. • Honor Code •
Academic integrity pledge is now in place, which coincides with the student honor code, but this Honor Code is not mandatory, but voluntary. The School of Engineering is adopting this pledge and Honor Code for every engineering student. In addition, the engineering faculty have created a task force within the school to make recommendations at the December All-Hands meeting on how to better address issues related to the Honor Code. • STEM: Where we are now • Godfrey went through the slides of STEM, what we have done, and where we are going. In the fall of 2013, the University decided to start planning a consolidated convergence of science and engineering facility and curriculum collaboration. Godfrey discussed the STEM Executive Committee and who is on it. The Provost, VP Finance, VP of Operations, Deans from Engineering & Arts and Sciences. There is also a STEM Steering Committee: 2 administrators, 3 engineering faculty, and 3 science faculty. The University is very motivated to set up a STEM campus for our students so that they are taught to collaborate with experts from other disciplines. Engineers and scientists learn to share both their expertise and their approaches to solving problems. • Comment: It is not clear that the kids coming out of our K-12 school systems will be able to benefit from this STEM environment. How our kids are being taught math and sciences in the K-12 system is vastly different, and we need to identify how well are these kids going to adjust to this different way of understanding and solving math and science problems, and will they be able to have convergence with what we are doing in the college systems. How we teach math is not simplistic, it is trying to give the kids an intuitive feel for numbers and it is not working by having social scientists trying to teach math concepts. • QUE: What are the advantages of this whole STEM proposal that is going to cost us $330 million dollars? • Godfrey and board members discussed the pros and cons of a STEM neighborhood and a joint science/engineering program and potentially new combined degrees. It is not clear at this time what will be merged as far as curriculum, degrees, labs and administration, so it is still a bit murky as far as having clear, concise outcomes for this STEM plan. •
Capital Campaign, was not discussed.
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Ho+K Introduction & STEM Planning -Ho+K Team • Meet Ho+K Consultants for SCU STEM program and planning • Godfrey introduced the Ho+K Team and they explained how they are handling the STEM visioning for the University. • Ho+K gave out an assignment to board members: write a headline for the announcement of the new STEM facility, and then decide where we should broadcast this, i.e. what media outlets. Ho+K will process these suggestions and return the results to the Dean. Roundtable ensued with ideas. There was a lot of support for advertising on the Wall Street Journal. • Another exercise ensued for “critical factors for success”. Write a goal statement for this facility for its success, “form & function”. A roundtable discussion ensued about proposed goal statements which promoted synergies, which board members had written on note cards provided and collected by the Ho+K facilitators. • Ho+K then asked board members to do another exercise which they were shown a series of photos of new STEM spaces, and were asked to choose with green label dots, the photos of things that they really liked and would like to see in our new STEM facility. • Discussion ensued on “Visioning, Programming, & Next Steps” with Ho+K.
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Break for Hors d’oeuvres & Beverages -All
V.
Planning for Computer Engineering Growth & Impact on Resources, Facilities, Faculty: -Nam Ling, Chair Computer Engineering Dept. • Dr. Nam Ling, Chair of our Computer Engineering department, came to the EAB meeting to present the current state of affairs for the computer engineering demands by both undergraduate and graduate students. • Graduate enrollment has increased 129% from 5 years ago. This is more than 50% of the entire school of engineering graduate student enrollment. • For our admission process, as long as the students meet our entrance admission criteria we will accept them. • What can we expect for the future… in computer engineering there be more computer and technical computing jobs than graduating students. • Problem also with tenure track faculty in Computer Engineering which has only grown by 37% in the last 5 years, so we are not keeping up with the ability to teach all the Computer Engineering students. At present we have 10 tenure track faculty 5.5 academic year adjunct lecturers and 26 quarterly part time lecturers who are all teaching. • It is not possible to teach all Computer Engineering students with tenure track faculty alone. • It is also very hard to compete to attract high quality teaching lecturers because the salary does not match what they could be paid by industry companies/corporations.
Ø Dr. Ling asked… QUE: How can we capture more Computer Engineering students as this is a great opportunity for the University and the School of Engineering? Ø Dr. Ling also suggested: perhaps Board Members can ask industry to supply some industry professionals to teach a class as a quarterly part time lecturer. Ø Board members noted that this is a great opportunity… one that the School of Engineering should not push away, but see how they can capture and capitalize on this large influx. Ø Dr. Ling noted that the Computer Engineering faculty workload is very heavy now with a large number of students to advise. At the undergraduate level there is 1 faculty assigned for advising of 50 students, At the Graduate level there is 1 faculty to every 100 students to advise. Board Advice: • Perhaps limit the amount of students that you admit to Computer Engineering • If you limit your class size you can have a better quality control over the program • Just try and keep a good balance of student enrollment to available faculty lecture hours • Is there a cycle to this, be careful that we do not go through another recession where you hire too many faculty who then cannot teach because there are not enough students in that discipline • How about using faculty from other academic institutions, who have a year sabbatical, and who may be interested in teaching here during their sabbatical, this may be a viable option to resolve this surge. VI.
General Business -John Maydonovitch • Report: Executive Committee Meeting Members: (Bill Carter, John Maydonovitch, Godfrey Mungal, Renee Niemi, Christine Nichols (Ex officio), & Marc van den Berg) The Executive Committee looked at the EAB Roster, and started to move some members over to the “Emeritus” status, and John discussed what topics/issues the Executive Committee worked on at this last meeting o Identify high-impact discussion topics o Discuss board winery event at Testarossa Winery o Review Engineering Excellence Fund results and board participation o Evaluate current and future board members o Discuss the “Capital Campaign” for the new STEM buildings o Discussed follow-up on the May workshop board feedback to STEM Committee • Discussed EAB demographics & any potential Computer Engineering Board Members, need recommendations about this, send to John Maydonovitch or Christine Nichols.
• The Executive Committee did take a look at possible 3 nominations to join the EAB, and the EAB Exe. Committee has extended an invitation for one candidate to join. • Ideas were discussed about the Engineering Excellence Fund & seeking 100% Board participation, 58% participation was attained last year, and we hope to increase that percentage of participation this year. • Briefly touched on the October 11th Big Bash and what is being planned • October 23rd Testarossa Winery Event, please RSVP for this event soon. • John discussed that there have been named 3 Hackworth fellows, they are now looking for engineering related ethical cases that they can use as teaching tool, so if you have had any engineering ethics issues that would make a good case study, please let us know. Will route the write up. • Next Meeting –January 15, 2015 –Winter Meeting VII. Adjourn
7:03 p.m.