Richard C. Benson
Dean of the College of Engineering
Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Chair
Virginia Tech's College of Engineering is comprehensive. We are the home to 13 departments with some 330 faculty, 6,000 undergraduate majors, and almost 2,000 graduate students. We have a strong reputation among our peers, and one reason is our innovative leadership in engineering education.
For example, in 1984 we led the nation, becoming the first public College of Engineering to require our entering students to have desktop computers. Subsequently, we changed our computer requirement from desktop to laptop, leading to many innovations in classroom instruction and team projects. In 2006, the College of Engineering's freshman class was required to have Tablet PCs. Our students and faculty have taken advantage of the Tablet PC's many advanced teaching features such as the ability to receive a copy of the instructor's notes, including in-class electronic ink annotations.
Having a laptop provides our students with continual access to notes, data, applications software and other information in class, group meetings, and study sessions. Network plug-ins and wireless network access are currently available in many classrooms and study areas. We are constantly exploring the frontiers of computer technology in education.
Also, we adopted a “Hands-On, Minds-On” philosophy of learning that has served our students well, making them among the most desirable engineering graduates among employers. One secret to our students' successes is a unique facility where our design teams work. Known as the Ware Lab, we invite you to visit this facility to learn more about ongoing student design projects and our exciting approach to hands-on, minds-on engineering. When our alumni or guests tour the Ware Lab, they offer comments ranging from, “I wish we had this when I was in college,” to “this is the future of effective engineering undergraduate education.” Corporations and businesses are impressed with the students in the Ware Lab who are allowed to sharpen theoretical and computational skills learned in the classroom by working on challenging, viable engineering design projects.
Testimony to the success of our educational philosophy is the Wall Street Journal’s published survey of 479 of the largest public and private U.S. companies, nonprofits, and government agencies. In the 2010 survey, Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering ranked as the number five pick for graduates best prepared and most able to succeed.
A demonstration of this preparedness is our participation in many exciting design competitions where we tend to do extremely well. For example, the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Team of Virginia Tech won the international EcoCAR Challenge, a three-year design competition that seeks to inspire science and engineering students to build more energy-efficient “green” automobiles. Every student on this team was offered employment. In another international competition, Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory team dominated the robot soccer competition known as RoboCup, winning the Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup, the competition’s version of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s World Cup. In general, the Virginia Tech aerospace and ocean engineering students have won more aircraft, spacecraft and ship design awards than any other student team in the country at the international group design competitions sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, major aerospace industries, and the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.
Instead of starting a bioengineering department, we've hit on a very powerful and innovative way to engage in the fields of bioengineering and biotechnology. We partnered with Wake Forest University with its premier medical facility to create a joint School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. The school offers MS and Ph.D. degrees.
Virginia Tech is part of a consortium of schools that comprise the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), a major research and education collaboration supported by NASA through the Langley Research Center in Hampton. Other members of the consortium are University of Virginia, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foundation, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and University of Maryland-College Park. Enrolled students may take classes from any of the participating universities.
We are building the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS), targeted to become a major, nationally prominent "home" for high-end, interdisciplinary research in the physical and engineering sciences. Since 2007 we have opened three buildings dedicated to work conducted by ICTAS faculty and students, as well as office and laboratory space at Virginia Tech’s facility in Ballston, Va.
U.S. News & World Report typically ranks our undergraduate programs between 5th and 15th among all accredited engineering schools, and in the Top 10 among those at public universities. Virginia Tech is among the great polytechnics of the US, an impressive list with schools such as MIT, Caltech, Georgia Tech, and RPI, known for their depth and breadth of technical education.
I have highlighted just a few of the many exciting things going on in our College and on our campus. We hope you will read more about our College and departments on the web-and visit us in person to take a tour of our facilities and programs.
For additional information on undergraduate programs and how to apply to the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, visit the Academic Affairs section of our website or E-mail Academic Affairs.
For additional information on engineering graduate programs and admission, go to research and graduate studies and individual departmental websites or E-mail Graduate Programs.
For general information about the College, Email Us.
I invite you to read the current issue of my e-newsletter to find out about recent news in the College of Engineering.
Please consider joining us at Virginia Tech and writing in your own unique segment of our success story!
Richard Benson, Dean of the College of Engineering
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