Trip to USC and other such things..

Baylor had its annual fall break this past weekend. Instead of taking my usual trip up to Arlington to visit family I headed out to California to visit Los Angeles and check out USC's graduate engineering program. A friend and I both received travel grants to make the trek, so the trip was mostly free. Yay for hard work paying off.

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.

Thoughts on engineering (Part 1)

Tonight I took a break from unpacking all of my worldly possessions to have dinner with one of my friends and his dad. (I'll call him Mr. S) Mr. S is an engineer who works with the military on a number of various projects. I really enjoy getting to talk to professional engineers about their jobs, and during dinner Mr. S talked about how the military had started trying to get design input from former aerospace engineers from Boeing in an effort to gain a fresh perspective on some of the problems that have come up in Afghanistan and Iraq. At one point during the conversation we talked about how even though some of the solutions that had been thought up were great by aerospace standards they did not even come close to being viable answers to the problems that the soldiers were having on the ground.

I think it is fascinating that even though there are tons of similarities across all of the engineering related industries there are still such large differences. It can be intimidating at times to think that I might get stuck in some branch of engineering that I am not particularly interested in, but in the end I really just look forward to diving in head first and finding out what makes me tick.