Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Engineering at Dartmouth



Maria Laskaris, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid had a great conversation with Joseph Helble, Dean of Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. We want to thank all our viewers who tuned in live and asked a number of phenomenal questions. It was a great conversation thanks to your questions.

Watch the video and use the notes below as resource in understanding how Dartmouth does Engineering differently. Enjoy.
  • One of the most popular and busy areas of Engineering at Dartmouth is biomedical engineering. Many Thayer faculty, alumni, and even undergraduates have been involved in bio-tech start-ups.
  • Faculty at Thayer are incredibly active with research and entrepreneurship and what's so amazing about Engineering at Darmouth (and this is true for departments across campus) is that undergraduates have wonderfully easy access to these professors. Dean Helble explains that undergraduates can simply go knock on a professor's door (though likely it'll be open already) to chat about possible work and involvement in research. Or undergraduates can just chat with a professor right after class.
  • Computer Engineering at Dartmouth focuses more on hardware while Computer Science focuses more on software, but there's lots of collaboration between the two fields and departments at Dartmouth.
  • For more information about the BA Major in Engineering (liberal arts degree) and the BE (Bachelors of Engineering) visit the degrees webpage.
  • Students can begin taking engineering classes as early as their first year. AP credits can certainly help students get a jump-start on prerequisites for the degree and that can help them graduate in 4 years with a BA and BE.
  • Students interested in Engineering may submit an abstract of their previous research work with their application, though it won't be sent to the Engineering School for review, it'll just help the officer reading your application get a sense of your intellectual work and interests. Please don't send entire papers.
  • All Dartmouth majors require a culminating experience (this can be independent research, a play or performance, a project, or any number of things). Similarly, Engineering at Dartmouth (the major and BE) requires a culminating experience.
  • Engineering, like all academic programs at Dartmouth, requires time and effort, but engineering students are involved across campus with everything from serving as Captain of the Ski Team to being a tour guide.
  • Engineering undergraduates will take courses across campus and fulfill Dartmouth's liberal arts distributive requirements (this is true for BA and BE students).
  • Courses in engineering may be co-taught by faculty from other areas of campus, including the Medical School, Tuck School of Business or other departments. Dartmouth is very interdisciplinary by nature given it's size and philosophy.
  • Engineers from Dartmouth go on to do pretty much anything and everything. Graduates of Thayer are leading corporations large and small, have started their own firms for engineering or architecture or gone into the arts and design. Some go into finance and consulting while others go into public service and the non-profit sector.
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