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Session 2555

A Graduate Engineering Program at a Liberal Arts College

Bernard J. Weigman, Glenn S. Kohne Loyola College, Baltimore, MD Introduction

Loyola College in Maryland is a small liberal arts college. In 1977, Loyola, then predominantly an undergraduate college, started a graduate program in Engineering. There existed at that time an undergraduate department in Engineering Science, Computer Science and Physics (ENSCAP). The goal of the undergraduate department was to provide a rigorous engineering program for students who also wanted to have a background in the liberal arts. It was our conviction then, as it is now, that engineers, in addition to being well trained in their disciplines, should also know how to write and speak and appreciate the classics. The graduate program originally was in the ENSCAP department. The goal of the graduate program was initially to provide quality graduate courses for engineers who were having difficulty keeping abreast of the changes in the world of electrical and computer engineering, changes brought about largely because of the rapid growth of the microelectronics industry.

Beginning of the Program

In the 1950's, Loyola College, a small liberal arts college with a good reputation in the sciences, added an engineering physics option to the Physics major, a major which had existed for many years. The engineering option was intended to allow students to take their first two years at Loyola, taking mainly liberal arts courses, which included math and physics, and then transfer to the Johns Hopkins University. Hopkins is only about a mile away from Loyola. The student would then attend Hopkins for three years to complete his degree requirements. The combined program took the student 5 years and he finished with a bachelors degree in engineering. Because of the 5 year completion time, the program was not extremely popular. Loyola then started to add engineering courses of their own, allowing the student to finish Loyola College in 4 years with a degree in Physics Engineering and then go on to Hopkins where the student could get a master's degree in a year, concentrating on a particular major such as Electrical Engineering, Civil Engineering or Materials Engineering. Thus the student could receive a bachelors degree and a masters degree in the same 5 year span as it previously took to receive just a bachelors degree. This program was much more popular with the students. The courses offered at Loyola concentrated on the basic engineering courses in statics and dynamics, electricity and magnetism and materials plus advanced courses in areas such as mathematical physics. When our graduates competed with students from more traditional engineering programs, the advanced theory courses allowed them to hold their own even though they did not have all of the undergraduate courses normally taken in engineering schools.

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Weigman, B. J., & Kohne, G. S. (1998, June), A Graduate Engineering Program At A Liberal Arts College Paper presented at 1998 Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/1-2--7151