Famous Trojan Statue on USC campus
Greg standing next to a really big thermal vacuum chamber.
The visit was pretty amazing and I am so glad that I got to see what the school was like first hand. It was a totally different experience from Baylor's engineering school. We have one building and a really limited amount of lab space for our small amount of faculty; they have eight or ten buildings with what seems like limitless lab space for their 200 or so faculty who are doing groundbreaking research.
I know that the schools aren't really comparable due to the fact that Baylor's engineering program is pretty young, small , and pretty much ignored by the university as a whole. USC on the other hand has an established program that is the academic gem (or so the dean called it..) of the school and the university president is an engineer.
Despite all of that I can't help but find myself thinking about all of the ways that our engineering program could be better here at Baylor. There have been multiple times when I have approached a faculty member with an idea for entering Baylor into a competition or a conference or something along that line and the response is almost always "Baylor isnt' ready for that / we don't have the funding". The same thing tends to happen when I discuss graduate school with most of my professors. Even though the department is always touting how well prepared we will be for industry or grad school once we finish here the faculty usually recommend the same old schools for graduate work and they don't seem too excited by the prospect of a student of theirs applying to somewhere like USC or Stanford or MIT. If we are really just as well prepared as our peers shouldn't a student who excels here at Baylor be ready for the big leagues?
In the end I think that Baylor has a pretty good department, but I can see us becoming a truly great department one day. I guess I'll just have to check back someday and see when it is ready for greatness.
