Added: 11/09/2005 |
Dartmouth engineering - a way to excellence in teaching and researchDartmouth College is the home of three professional graduate schools. In the center of our attention is the Thayer School of Engineering. Founded in 1867, Dartmouth engineering school is one of the nation's oldest professional schools of engineering. The School includes both the Undergraduate Department of Engineering Sciences and a graduate professional school in engineering.
The School is named for Sylvanus Thayer, a graduate from Dartmouth (1807) and from the United States Military Academy at West Point (1808). In ten years' time, he earned himself the title of "father of the U.S. Military Academy" after his appointment as Superintendent of West Point that he had turned into an outstanding school of engineering. It was supposed to satisfy the demand for both civil and military engineers and remained the first and only school of civil engineering in the U.S. until 1828.
The Academy did not suffice for Thayer's far-reaching designs to enhance the national engineering education. Hence, he founded Dartmouth engineering school with the goal to bring civilian engineering education up to standard and meet the growing demand for engineers trained in service to society.
The Dartmouth engineering school conducts its educational programs within a single integrated building (following the Dartmouth tradition uniting university resources with the closeness and friendliness of a small college) and it is extremely small as compared to its peers at chief research universities. This small size is deliberate and aims at maintaining a sense of community and close student-faculty co-operation.
As far as undergraduate programs are concerned, their focus is the interdisciplinary study in engineering sciences within the bounds of a broad liberal arts education. At the graduate level, the Thayer School offers degrees through the doctorate blending scholarship, research, experimentation, problem solving, and design.
The Dartmouth engineering school enjoys a number of amphitheater-size classrooms, seminar and conference rooms, research and instructional laboratories, and state-of-the-art machine shops. Both students and faculty for an assortment of engineering projects use more than 150 UNIX-based engineering workstations; and the college is in course of constructing a new Engineering Sciences Center, which will include an engineering design and fabrication center for students.
The Thayer School is also at the very cutting edge of computer-based education. A variety of wired and wireless networks gives students and faculty an easy access to the university's information resources through handheld computers, notebooks and tablet PCs. These networks are available in all of the school's buildings, and even in some areas outside within the general campus. In fact, wireless is clearly the preferred technology since it is too expensive to use wired systems within the school's older buildings.
To sum it up one should mention the key points, which distinguish the Dartmouth engineering school among other institutions of the kind:
-practical approach to engineering which enables students to apply principles to actual problems;
-liberal arts background to teach students to see the totality of a problem;
-flexibility of program due to which 30 percent of engineering students complete a dual major, a modified major or a minor.
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