On Feburary 1st and 2nd I visited Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) for my 9th set of interviews. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Deborah Jackman (Dept. Head) and Dr. John Zachar I met a large precentage of the faculty critical to the design aspects of AE program and quite a few others as well. As on my prior visits everyone was welcoming and helpful making my visit both productive and enjoyable.
What did I learn?
About the MSOE program
- In a small (2,500), private school, the Architectural Engineering and Building Construction Department is a large player
- The department's approximately 350 students are about 15% of the school's total student body
- Unlike most other institutions I've visited, there is no Civil Engineering department at MSOE
- This means that all the fundamental mechanics courses are taught by AEBC faculty
- Building Construction focuses on what many schools would call construction management
- All AE students are required to take at least two courses in this area
- Graduate studies and research play a very minor role in the department
- Research productivity is not an expectation of faculty, though it does "count" if faculty choose to pursue it
- Tenure is not used at MSOE
- Instead there are long-term contracts
- 4, 6, 8 years for assitant, associate and full professors respectively
- In practice, once someone has passed their first review they are unlikely to be dropped
- The review is based 60% on teaching evaluations - primarily student course evaluations used for every course
- The other 40% is a list of contributions to department, university and profession (including research here)
- Promotion assumes good teaching and depends the other 40% of the review items
- The university made a decision 10 years ago to hire only PhD graduates for full-time positions
- This is having a gradual effect on the faculty, with some younger faculty having a greater desire to find time for research
- MSOE uses a very detailed "Micro-Load" system to account for faculty time
- The expectation is 43 hours/week
- It has allocations for class time, class prep, grading, advising, department meetings, coordinating
Teaching Methods and Curriculum
- MSOE is proud of it's committment to good teaching and the high ranking it has achieved in US News and World Report thanks to that reputation
- Class sizes are targeted at 20-25 students from Freshman year onward
- This means that there are often multiple sections of courses
- This large number of sections in turn explains the large number of adjunct faculty in the department
- The department offers three tracks for AE's, with all students taking at least two courses in each track
- Building Electrical Systems
- Building Environmental Systems
- Building Structural Systems
- There is one explicit Architectural studio in the curriculum
- There areencounters with design in earlier courses, starting with the freshman introduction course
- The capstone Senior Design 3-course sequence requires teams of approximately 7 students to program, design and engineering a "real" building
- There is pride in making the students "industry-ready" on graduation
- This translates into the curriculum in several ways
- Detailed consideration of code-compliance in discipline courses
- Labs with real industry equipment and emphasis on connecting theory to measured reality
- Participation in, and great success in, the General Building Contractors (GBC) national competitions
- The capstone design sequence works on "real" projects solicited by a faculty member from industry contacts.
- A large portion of the grade is determined by an independent industry panel without a faculty member
- The department is content with its teaching methods
- There is support for faculty who wish to take teaching improvement workshops such as those at Bucknell or the ASCE Exceed workshops.
- There does not, however, appear to be great effort invested in spreading lessons learned from such activities.
- There are university-level support activities
- They do not appear to hold much interest for most faculty
- Student advising is very strong
- I happened to be here during the week of the term in which students consult with their advisors about their next term's work. It was clear that faculty took this responsibility very seriously.
- Issues that concerned the faculty are:
- Sustainability - there is considerable pride that they are "ahead of the curve" in incorporating it throughout the curriculum
- BIM - Opinions varied, but what I heard most was a a"wait and see" attitude to determine how important it would become in the curiculum
- AE's have already adopted Revit as a standard tool for representation
- Bachelor + 30 - There did not appear to be much consensus on this though several faculty expressed strong, divergent opinions
- There were several comments about the difficulty of fitting in everything "necessary" in the current 192 quarter credits
- Technology - at least one faculty member expressed great pride in a fairly recent requirement that all students own a laptop
- It was felt to greatly enhance communication
AE Content Issues
- The faculty are pleased with the comprehensiveness of the systems that they address. In their coursework students have farily detailed exposure to:
- Structures
- HVAC
- Electrical
- Plumbing
- Fire Protection
- Construction Management
- As noted above, Sustainability and BIM (for representation) are already incorporated in the curriculum.
- All students take at least two courses in all the track areas.
Students
Faculty volunteered few comments about the students. When I asked they were pleased overall. The following observations were gleaned in response to my questions.
- The students are hard-working
- I had some comments that they find dealing with open-ended problems difficult - as is the case for students in most institutions.
- Most have part-time jobs to help meet their expenses
- But I heard no complaints about the part-time work hindering class performance
- I heard some a few comments that students are not as well prepared in their math and sciences as the faculty expected
- Attrition is fairly high during and at the end of the first year
- In the last two years enrollment is stable
- At least one faculty member regarded the atttiriton as a strength, proving that they had advised students well in the first year - students had real knowledge of what they were choosing, with some realizing that it wasn't for them.
- I did not get good data on graduate employment other than that their graduates are much sought after
- Anecdotally I was told that most AE's pursue consulting engineering design jobs plus with some in construction as well as ancillary occupations.
- The Building Construction major serves those who wish to work in the construction side of the industry
Observations
- MSOE strikes me as an institution that has a clear view of its role, one that has changed little over the years and one of which it's proud. They are training "industry-ready" practitioners with great success.
- Changes at MSOE are slow, but real
- The emphasis on sustaibility and the introduction of the BIM tool are examples of changes that not all schools have made
- The increasing importance of the PhD for faculty and the consequent gradual increase in the value placed on research by the faculty is another.
About my Sabbatical Project
- In my seminar presentation to the faculty I had the first opportunity to present some of the results from that I'd generated for my ASEE paper.
- I had few questions or comments about my analysis of the nine categories I've created to discuss the AE Design definitions.
