Mechanical Engineering Graduate Program Webinar

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My screen keeps freezing so just get started, then um, hi everyone and welcome um my name is Dorothy Chang and I'm the graduate program manager in the mechanical engineering Department and I also support computer science and electrical engineering.

OK, I don't know if doctor Porter is here. Do you want to introduce yourself as well?

Sure, uh, hello everyone? I'm Jason Order. I'm a faculty member in mechanical engineering and the assistant Department head for graduate studies for mechanical engineering, so I'll be working with Dorothy today in presenting some materials about our program.

Thanks so as we go, if you have questions you can feel free to write them in the chat and then will answer them either through the presentation or at the end. We'll have some open time for questions.

And so I first want to welcome you to mines and give you a bit of an introduction in mind. You may not be familiar with our campus, so we are in engineering University, located in the foothills of the Rocky Mountain Mines, has a long history, so the center photo here is one of our oldest traditions that M climb, so there is a mountain side M that you can see from campus. It's was first constructed in 1908 and every year students were new to mines, undergraduates and graduates.

Climb up the mountain to the AM and fill it in with rocks that they bring from their hometown. So that's a fun tradition that if you join us, I hope that you will participate in.

We have an excellent reputation, an relationship with employers and you can see that in the our career outcomes. So 97% of our Masters graduates had positive career outcomes when they graduated. So that means they had a job or they were enrolled in further education. In 2018 nineteen and we have a great Career Center with lots of excellent resources. We actually hosts the largest career fair in the state of Colorado every year.

So one of the benefits of being at mines is you join a really supportive community, so I said that I'm the graduate program manager. That means that all support you throughout your application admission process as you work towards your degree, making sure you complete all those steps to graduation and your meeting all your degree requirements. So In addition to that academic advising, we have a lot of social events within the Mechanical Engineering Department graduate students socials. There is an excellent graduate student government at mines. They provide grants for students to travel to.

Conferences they provide free business cards, so it's a great thing to get involved with.

We have family support services. We know that a lot of our students also have families, so there's a lot of resources for you there. And again, our Career Center I'm going to give a shout out to that or average starting salary for Mechanical Engineering Masters graduates was over $80,000 last year.

All right?

And I'll let Doctor Porter take it away.

Wonderful, um?

Thank you for coming today and learn more about our program so each of your own motivations for looking at Graduate School. And that's unique to you and and we understand that as a program and want to make our program as adaptable as we can to your needs and interests. Some of you just want to deep in an expander education, and so there's wonderful curriculum that we have prepared for our students with world leading researchers in.

And these different topics you can gain new technical skills by working either computationally V advanced software or or experimentally working in the labs of the different faculty members and getting hands-on experience with cutting edge research tools.

And it also opens doors for exciting careers. So whether it's a Masters degree or PhD degree, these degrees prepared to work in industry and national labs in top research centers and in academia.

A little bit about our Department. We have almost 40 faculty with 26 of those who are on the 10 year tenure track, or they're doing balancing research and teaching and running a research group. We have 10 teaching faculty who primarily focus on teaching courses. They also have done pH, DS and have expertise in different research areas, but they primarily teach and then we have three professors of practice who focus primarily on.

Um combination of research and teaching. But they, uh, they bring industry perspective from years of experience in industry to deepen our offerings in our graduate program we have, we have several different divisions, so 4 research divisions and then interdisciplinary programs, and you can see the breakdown of the faculty and each of those divisions. So the largest faculty are in solid mechanics, materials, and manufacturing. Then we have thermal fluid and energy systems.

Robotics, automation, bio mechanics, and then our interdisciplinary graduate programs. I'll talk about a little bit later.

So identifying the right program for you has to do with your career goals we have.

Faculty who do research every year in different areas where they are funded externally from industry and from government. Last year alone we had almost $12,000,000 in grants for just our mechanical engineering faculties. There's a lot of research activity going on. This reaches activity affects both the students who work directly on research, but also goes into our course work as well as they bring their expertise and research results, and sometimes bring their their classes in their labs to have hands-on experience with.

With what's happening here on campus so the Masters non thesis program is 30 credit hours of course work. It usually takes between a year in a year and a half depending upon the course load that's chosen and there are there is some funding available for hourly positions for our non thesis students for Masters of science thesis option. These students also take 30 credit hours, but six of those hours are for thesis work, so that's writing up their thesis and doing research with their faculty member.

And this takes a little bit longer about a year and a half to two years, depending on the students progress in the research. And there is. These are funded through teaching appointments or research appointments with the faculty member or the department for research appointments. These these are funds that are sought and awarded to the faculty member and those funds are then passed on to the student to do the research in the lab on the direction of the faculty member. And then there's a doctor philosophy option that's 36 credit hours.

Of course work. 36 credit hours of thesis work and it takes four to five years, so it's a longer commitment, but you go much deeper in your understanding of of your particular topic that we research and truly become a world expert in that area. When you finish your thesis, and those are also funded through teaching appointments and research appointments or fellowships.

So a little bit about the graduate student population. Our Department. We have around 150 graduate students enrolled in minds just in the mechanical engineering major itself. If you include the interdisciplinary graduate programs that are housed within mechanical engineering, we have almost 240 students altogether.

So it's a healthy group of students. The breakdown is a little bit over half of these students are Masters non thesis students, so they are taking coursework only. There still advised by our faculty members they still meet with faculty as part of their coursework for academic advising, but they don't do research actively.

There's Masters, the next group is master's thesis students. This is a smaller group. They do, they acted, do actually do research, funded the faculty. They work in a research group and they have their own meeting with that resource group in a regular basis.

And then there is the PhD students she talked about before, which is kind of the second largest group of students. And they're here for longer period of time, again between four and five years.

There's different options for graduate student support, so as I mentioned before, for Masters non thesis students, there are hourly positions available in Department to be hourly researchers or two TA or grade for courses, and those are those positions are advertised every semester. The students can apply to those for thesis space students they receive teaching or research assistantship that provides their full tuition.

Um health insurance, as well as a monthly stipend for living expenses.

There's also additional forms of support in the in fellowships from independent funds, and every student has access to our faculty for advising and mentoring. If you're doing a thesis, whether it's a Masters or PhD, you also have a thesis committee that you can work with. These faculty that you choose with your advisor, who have expertise that can help you and guiding you through your chosen pieces topic.

Here is our cost of attendance. So for the 2019-2020 academic year, if you're a Colorado resident, tuition is 16,650 with $2400 in fees, and for those who are out of state or international, the cost of attendance is 37,350 for tuition and the same for fees.

Students who will be doing research here and staying in the state of Colorado and apply for in state tuition if they qualify as well. For the second year.

The different programs that we have for Masters non thesis thesis and PhD or outline here these are the course requirements for graduation. So all of our students take me GN 502 which is an Advanced Mathematics Course where we do. You're doing a lot of computational mathematics and some kind of pen and paper math as well. But it lays the foundation for the advanced courses you'll be taking the graduate program.

There's a graduate seminar that the thesis space students in PhD students attend each semester where their peers will be sharing their current research findings.

There's a research core, so you'll pick a research division in which the focus for your Masters or PhD program and you choose three courses from that research division. Listen, I'll show you those lists in a minute.

And then there's technical electives, and these courses at depth and breath, and you can choose these again to kind of tailor your education to your goals. These are these courses.

Can be selected from the catalog in mechanical engineering and there's an across campus actually. And then there's me electives. Any four level or above me class or interdisciplinary classes as well.

For those doing research, as I mentioned before, you take research credits or graduate thesis credits to fill out your credit requirements for your program.

So I'm going to talk a little about the research division courses so we have 4 research divisions. I'll go through them briefly, so bio mechanics hazard has a research Koran. Associated course courses for that research core. So if your Masters non thesis student, you'd be selecting three of these courses to fill out your.

From

research core, so our research division core, our bio mechanics group on campus focuses on musculoskeletal bio mechanics, so there is both experimental and computational research going on in the Department, and the courses support that depth of understanding, both in computational bio mechanics as well as experimental bio mechanics, so these courses will help you gain a solid foundation in both the computational software needed for modeling human movement as well as understanding some of the experimental techniques that are used.

Um for validation and understanding impaired movement and things like that.

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Robotics and automation core. So this this group focuses on building robots on human robot interaction, an autonomous robot movement on.

An optimization 200 to optimize control and optimize robot behavior as well.

So this is a combination again of modeling and hands on experience opportunities for students as they take these courses and they're able to dig in and both build robots and model them and demonstrate their abilities in there in the classes.

Next group is are solid mechanics, materials and manufacturing core, so the students who choose to focus in this area can choose can choose from a list of courses that allow them to focus more deeply on computationally modeling material properties, material behavior. There's also an extensive.

Up extensive lab capabilities in in making measurements in different materials and structures. This group worked closely with our advanced manufacturing group, so we're doing additive manufacturing. There's X Ray tomography works. You can look inside of these materials and understand both grain structure and atomic makeup of these materials as well, so they're combining in this curriculum, both kind of world class experiment capabilities with world class modeling capabilities. We've recently.

Made some strides in virtual reality, allowing students to be able to get inside of these materials and see their grain structures using virtual reality tools so those those capabilities are here in campus view to to work with.

And then finally a research division in thermal fluids. This group focuses on energy systems on fluid flow, combustion, heat transfer and modeling large scale kind of thermal energy systems like solar power combustion and things like that and so. But again, here you have hands on experience, like in our combustion group you actually work with combustion engines in our heat transfer class. You can get into the lab and work with spectrometers and.

Infrared cameras and that kind of thing when there's also a lot of focus on computational fluid mechanics tools where that's ansys, fluent comsol.

Or Matlab based modeling of fluid flow and heat transfer in these types of systems.

So I encourage you to go to our website mechanicalmechanicalminds.edu/research where you can dig deeper and see highlights from faculties and the different research group that we have here in our Department to understand what are the current research programs that are taking place and see better.

More information in a deeper dive into what opportunities might be here for you, both in the classroom as well as in different research groups on campus.

So next time I show you a video from one of our bio robotics faculty about current research project going on in our Department.

All right, so next I'll talk a little bit about our interdisciplinary graduate programs. I'm going to highlight two of the programs. We also have programs and operations research, and in space resources that I will be talking about today, but those you can find more information about those programs on the website.

So I'm going to.

Introduce our fea pro certificate program, which is just launched last year. This is a program that was launched by one of our bio mechanics faculty Toning Petrella, who has years of industry and research experience using finite element tools to model.

Modeled systems, both in bio mechanics and outside of bio mechanics, and so in this. In this certificate you get hands-on experience learning how to use these tools and apply them. And at the end you get a certification in Ansys Saurian. In them finite element analysis.

There are.

3 core courses that you take an you choose one of the elective courses to focus on in your program, totaling four classes or 12 credits for the certificate.

Um, so again you you can this the benefit of one of the many benefits of this program is that it's fully online so that you can take this certificate program from anywhere in the world. You can also take a traditional mechanical engineering degree, so credential mass, for example Masters non thesis but take these FDA pro classes in your Masters, not thesis and earn the certificate along the way.

So encouraging, look deeper at some of these. If this is of interest. If you look at the website and get some more information about this program.

I'm not. I'm not going to talk about our program in advanced manufacturing, which I'll I'll let our one of our faculty, Craig Bryce, introduce his program next.

So I know if you've seen or not, but um Adam Savage has to has a television show that he he highlighted are additive manufacturing group last year in on his program, and they actually are professor Bryson. His students built a fully functional Iron Man suit and they float are they flew around. It's pretty incredible, so I encourage you to look that up so advanced manufacturing they use these added manufacturing tools that we have on campus to our adapt center.

As well as some advanced characterization and data analytics tools to really understand how to build parts that both meet the design criteria and also have the.

The capabilities needed for fatigue and for extended use and and those types of things. There's two options with this program. There's a Masters non thesis option with 30 credit hours and you you can also do a certificate option as well and you can fold that into our Masters non thesis in mechanical engineering if you'd like to do that.

Option.

So like I mentioned before.

This is an inner display. Programs to get it work with both faculty within mechanical engineering, but also faculty material science and another faculty across campus and use truly state of the art research facilities that we've built over last few years here at lines.

Alright, i'ma now turned over to Dorothy to finish our sides.

Thanks so I have going to show you a video now of some of our students so you can get more of a sense of what it's like to be a current student in.

Hi there, my name is Isabella Mendoza and I'm currently finishing up my first year as a PhD student in mechanical engineering here at the Colorado School of mines.

Who?

Thanks to Isabella in Winfred for recording those videos for us and if you have more questions for the students.

But they both agreed to give out their email addresses. So if you just send me an email I can put you in touch with those students. You can ask more questions about that student perspective, so I'll tell you a little bit about the application process. I hope by now you're just wondering how you can apply. We are still accepting applications for fall 2020 if that's something that you're interested in.

The final application deadline for students interested in thesis space programs is July 1st, but we have extended our non thesis application deadline to July 15th. If you're interested in a thesis based program and looking for funding now, our funding options are pretty limited for this fall, so I'd encourage you to apply for fall 2021 are priority deadline for funding consideration for fall 2021 is actually December 15th, so I apologize. There's a typo on this side, it says January 5th.

That our priority deadline in mechanical engineering is December 15th for fall 2020. One note that if you are applying for this fall 2020 for a non thesis, the Jirari Test score is wave so you can get that application and pretty easily. Usually our application requirements are Jerry score 3, letters of recommendation, a statement of purpose are resume and transcripts from any previous institution that you've attended.

You can see our minimum admission requirements on this slide, so these are really the minimum values that were looking for in in order to be a very competitive applicant, having scores above these minimum values is suggested, so a bachelors degree with a GPA of at least 3.0 competitive Jerry scores across the board, but in particular we're looking for quantitative section scores around 160 international applicants. There is an English proficiency requirement, so you can take a few different exams to meet that English proficiency score.

And then, if you're interested in the PhD program, prior research experience is desired, but it's not required. So you can see the application link here. Let us know if you have any questions, so here's our contact information for myself in Doctor Porter. You can feel free to email us after this session, or of course if you have questions now, just write them in the chat and will be happy to answer them.

And I know there are some students who had technical difficulties viewing this, so I'm sorry for that. But we will send out the link to the presentations. You can watch it all later.

I'm not seeing any questions coming in, so I guess we did a great job with our presentation answering all those questions that you had. Again, if you think of anything else, please feel free to reach out to us.

Oh, I just we just got one. So what is the best way to find research assistantship opportunities with looking at professors in their research work and contacting them? Be the best.

I would encourage you. I would say yes, um, feel free to do that. Um, I think doctor Porter shared the link on the slide where we talked about research areas. There's a link to our website that has more information about all those different research areas. An links to individual faculty, research group Web sites too. If you have anything else to add Doctor Porter.

Yeah, I think that's that's a great place to start and then it feel free to follow up with faculty independently. Send them an email. I usually recommend students include their resume and and kind of highlight in the relevant experience. They might have. That might make them qualified for that position or to work in that particular area. So yeah, definitely reach out to faculty if you have interest in area. And if you're in the in the area ever.

You come out to Denver Bum. Please stop by and and say hi, it's always good to see potential students come by and visit us.

Yeah.

Well, thanks so much for coming today.

We look forward to seeing your applications or to answering your questions or email.

Alright, take everybody.