Academics: Where are we now?

AEM Undergraduate Program

There seems to be a general increase in student interest in aerospace programs across the country. Of the 830 high school students admitted to the Institute of Technology in the fall of 2006 (transfers from other schools are another 273), 60 indicated they intended to major in AEM compared to 120 for ME, which is the most popular choice in IT (undecided is second at 102). We have seen a steady increase in our junior class size from about 50 six years ago to almost 80 for the current semester. Because of this, we have recently raised the BAEM upper division entrance GPA to 2.3 from 2.0 (out of 4) to control the number of students in our program. University policy dictates that this requirement can only be used to control numbers and not quality of the students entering our program, but our increased popularity does mean we can be (and have to be due to limited resources) more selective in the students we accept. Next fall a group of reviewers from ABET will visit and review our program and the other engineering programs in the Institute of Technology. This spring we will be writing our report to ABET on the past 6 years of changes to and evaluation of the BAEM program. I would like to thank all of you that have completed the numerous surveys about your educational experience. This information is a key part of the evaluation process for our program and without it we would not be able to maintain our accreditation, something we have held continuously since it began for aeronautical programs in 1938. It is also a great help that Professor Garrard has just finished his term as the ABET Commissioner for AIAA. Commissioners lead the evaluation team for an entire school. Professor Leo has also been doing ABET evaluations of other aerospace programs. Thus we have first-hand knowledge of the process and what is required for a successful review. Student projects continue to be an important and popular part of our program. The Solar Vehicle Project (www.svp.umn.edu) is now managed out of the AEM Department and Jeff Hammer, our Industrial Professor, is the team advisor. They just returned from racing their car through the busy streets of Taiwan to 4th place as part of the World Solar Rally. This year we have one team involved in NASA's microgravity program and they just submitted their proposal to fly their experiment on the C-9 "Vomit Comet" next spring. They have proposed to study cavitation around a propeller when the cavities formed are not buoyant. The students involved in the Nanosat-4 project (www.aem.umn.edu/proj-prog/nanosat/) have successfully completed their critical design review and now are working hard to get their satellite built by the June 2007 deadline. They will then compete with ten other schools for the chance to have their design, which will attempt to use GPS for attitude determination, launched into space.
Tom Shield
Director of Undergraduate Studies

CSDy Graduate Program Update

The CSDy Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program provides an opportunity for interdisciplinary research in control science and dynamical system theory. The program coordinates scholarly and scientific activity of these areas within IT and the University and coordinates its activities with industrial firms in the Minnesota region. CSDy faculty are drawn from the Departments of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, as well as from the Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, all in IT, and from the Departments of Economics and Political Science. The Co-Directors of the CSDy Center are Prof. Gary Balas (AEM) and Prof. Tryphon Georgiou (ECE), and Prof. Balas serves as CSDy's Director of Graduate Studies. There were 8 students pursuing their Ph.D.s during the 2005-2006 academic year, with one student graduating. The Program featured several seminars this year which included: Suboptimal model order reduction via classical relaxations of quadratic programming by Professor Alexandre Megretski, MIT; The error variance of the optimal linear smoother is the harmonic mean of the power spectral density by Professor Tryphon Georgiou, University of MN; Approximation of large-scale dynamical systems by Professor Thanos Antoulas, Rice University; The interaction between communication and control by Professor Sekhar Tatikonda, Electrical Engineering, Yale University; A semidefinite programming approach for control of systems along trajectories by Dr. Mazen Farhood, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Gary Balas
Director of Graduate Studies
CSDy Program

AEM Graduate Program Update