Industry University Partnerships In Mechanical And Manufaturing Engineering At Tufts University

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University has a long history of industry-university partnerships. Up until the late 1960’s, these interactions focused on education programs such as apprenticeships leading to associates degrees. Growing emphasis on government-sponsored research and full-time undergraduate study directly after high school reduced the organization and substance of industrial interactions during the 1970’s and the early 1980’s. This paradigm began to change around 1985 and new partnerships have continued to expand to this day. One major influence that stimulated this reengagement was the growth and integration of manufacturing engineering within the mechanical engineering curriculum, instigated by renewed industrial interest in sponsoring employees for continuing education to keep current with changing technology. The need for practical relevancy led to the establishment of our Industrial Advisory Council with members from several companies and the US government. New programs emerged such as the Certificate Program in Manufacturing Engineering and a part-time Masters of Engineering degree program with a project focus. Other collaborative activities include joint responsibility for the Annual Thermal Manufacturing Workshop, industrial sponsorship of senior design projects and providing outside feedback as part of our ABET EC2000 continuous improvement process. The current level of collaboration is good but can be improved. For a university in which most of the students attend classes full-time during the day, meeting the needs of the students from industry and part -time students requires not only additional commitment of resources but also fundamental infrastructure changes. Finally, on the research side, the differing time scales and priorities of academe and industry always pose a challenge. Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 765.1 Background And Current Status The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University has a long history of industry-university partnership. Up until the mid-1960’s, companies such as General Electric had apprentice programs in which the students worked full-time during the day and took classes in the evenings and on Saturdays at Tufts University. The students were typically from middleclass backgrounds with good hands-on skills. They had an acquired intuition about how products worked and how they were manufactured but lacked a strong analytical knowledge base. The post-Sputnik engineering science "revolution" that fostered a focus on science over application led to a period of increased emphasis on government sponsorship of engineering science research. The apprentice programs were discontinued and many of the hands -on laboratories of the “old” curriculum were replaced with applied science and mathematics courses. Industry connections with Tufts became less organized. Undergraduate admission decisions relied more heavily on standardized tests such as the SAT. Tufts, as many other private universities, centered its student recruitment on full-time students coming directly out of high school. Further, engineering graduate students, especially those from the United States, typically entered graduate studies with little practical experience. This led to a dramatic change in the demographics / socio-economic background of the student population. The decline in the competitive advantage of the United States in the areas of manufactured goods and product quality in the early 1980’s triggered a call for revamping of engineering education with a re-emergence of the industry-university linkages. Our experience at Tufts is a microcosm of the transition across the country. The challenge of the recent evolution was and is to develop symbiotic relationships that are quite distinct from the government research grant model at one extreme to product development consultation at the other. Four overlapping areas characterize current interactions at Tufts. First, the development, growth and integration of manufacturing engineering within the mechanical engineering curriculum instigated a renewed industrial interest in sponsoring employee-students to take courses and keep current with changing technology. In 1988, Tufts University started the postbaccalaureate Certificate Programs. Presently there are nine programs in areas such as manufacturing engineering, biotechnology, microwave and wireless engineering, etc. In order to get a Certificate, a student typically has to take four or five courses. These courses are typically more applied in nature, focusing on process and production topics. Within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, most part-time, post-baccalaureate students start in the Certificate Program in Manufacturing Engineering (see Table 1). Many of these students continue on for their Master’s degree as all the courses taken as part of the Certificate program can be used to satisfy the requirements for the graduate degree. The certificate program is open to students with a bachelor’s degree and a background in engineering, science, or mathematics. The program is especially useful to professionals who want to enhance their understanding of quality, manufacturing processes, automation, CAD and controls. The core certificate courses are taught in the evenings, often once or twice per week. The courses are taught by either full-time faculty Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 765.2 or outside lecturers if the topic is specialized (e.g. Injection Molding). The student population is a mix of senior undergraduates, full-time graduate students and part-time graduate students. This mix provides a fertile learning environment for these courses because the various groups complement each other with the students from industry bringing practical problems to the classroom. Presently, half of our graduate students are part-time students (numbering approximately 30 at this time) who work full-time in industry and/or government. In 1998, we instituted a project-based Masters of Engineering (MEng) as an alternative to the traditional research thesisbased MS as a vehicle for this part-time population. This degree program is more structured in its coursework requirements, emphasizing technical breadth to enhance the student’s knowledge basis, and a project, that is not constrained by a requirement to include publishable, research quality outcomes. We encourage MEng students to use current challenges in their workplace as the basis for their project. The success of part-time programs at Tufts is based on a strategic decision to emphasize quality and personal mentorship rather than volume. The principal consumer population is local companies within a reasonable commuting distance to the campus. The school’s suburban location has some advantage over more densely populated urban schools. A representative sample includes PRI Automation, Gillette, Teradyne, Foster Miller, C.S. Baird and Raytheon. A special relationship has been developed with GE Aircraft Engines (GEAE). GEAE is one of the largest employers of Mechanical / Manufacturing Engineers locally. Engineers (typically with a BSME), who participate in GEAE's internal "A-course" program, are admitted to our masters programs (either MS or MEng) with credit for 2 of the 10 course credits required. Typically, MEng projects count for 1 course credit while MS projects vary from 2-3 course credits depending upon work scope (see Table 2). The GEAE-Tufts partnership is also interesting from an historical perspective given that General Electric was the largest participant in the old apprentice program. The second interaction arena is our Industrial Advisory Council (IAC) with members from several companies and the US government. This group was convened in the early 1990's to advise our manufacturing engineering activities, especially those related to Tufts' focus in Thermal Manufacturing. The mission of Thermal Manufacturing activities is to “develop a critical mass of faculty in the department working and collaborating on manufacturing problems, which are recognized to be important to industry. The focus of the fundamental research will be ‘thermal manufacturing’ area where materials are ‘transformed’ by the application of thermal and mechanical energy to other states and geometry's whereby the end product and properties are dependent on process parameters and fundamental phenomena, which occur during processing. Thus, this area is characterized by fundamental research relating to materials structure, materials' characterization (such as constitutive behavior), applied mechanics (both solid and thermalfluids), computational modeling of processes, process control and sensing, and product design.” Details about the Thermal Manufacturing program can be found at [1]. Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 765.3 In 1999, the department decided to use the new ABET EC2000 criteria for accreditation of the BSME program. Accordingly, it is required that the BSME program constituencies not only include faculty, students, staff and administrators but also alumni and industrial advisors. The role of IAC was then expanded to include advising the department across all programs, participating in our ABET EC2000 continuous improvement process, and helping organize and execute other outreach activities. Current members of IAC are from government and small and large industries such as the US Army Research Laboratory, GE Aircraft Engines, Lucent Technologies, Corning-Lasertron and Cambridge Applied Systems. These outreach activities define the third and fourth areas of