1 - Graduate Program Philosophy
1 - Graduate Program Philosophy
Welcome to the graduate education program in the Chemical Engineering Department of Brigham Young University. Your admission indicates our confidence in your abilities to succeed in advanced study and research. We expect you to put forth your best effort to learn new concepts and to develop research and learning skills beyond what you have acquired as an undergraduate. In turn, the faculty and staff will do their best to help you accomplish your educational goals. We anticipate that your time in graduate school will be some of the best of your life.
1.1 - Graduate Degrees
Because you have been admitted to our graduate program, you probably know something about what a graduate degree involves. However, the nature of a graduate program is so different from an undergraduate degree that you would be wise to read and reread the following paragraphs on the philosophy of graduate education. This will help you keep the ultimate objectives of your graduate education clearly in mind. Both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are research-oriented degrees. Course work is essential, but unlike undergraduate studies, is not the core of your studies. Your course work is designed both to broaden your understanding of chemical engineering and to deepen your insights into a specific area. This prepares you to make original contributions to a specific field. Working at the forefront of engineering science on a problem that is unique and specific to you will become the focus and highlight of your graduate studies.
As a graduate student, you will find yourself at a different level of interaction with faculty and peers than as an undergraduate, spending more time in discussions and problem solving with other graduate students and faculty and working with and discussing new problems with your faculty advisor. You will also find that more time must be devoted to learning on your own. Your academic independence will increase as you find that answers to some of the more profound questions confronting you are not in textbooks but must be searched out in the scientific literature or through diligent personal study. As your graduate work progresses, a single thesis or dissertation problem will absorb your thoughts and excite your curiosity. You will become an expert in that particular field.
More important than the specific problem you work on are the problem-solving techniques that you learn. Future employers rarely hire graduates to work on the same problem with which they wrestled in graduate school, though you will probably work in the same specialized area. Rather, they hire M.S. and Ph.D. students because of their acquired skills for concisely formulating, investigating, and solving complex technical problems, as well as their ability to present technical information to others. Keeping these ideas in mind, you may find interesting the definitions of the two degrees provided by the Council of Graduate Schools in the United States, (quoted in the National Research Council's book Engineering Graduate Education and Research):
Broadly speaking, the master's degree indicates that the holder has mastered a program in a particular field sufficiently to pursue creative projects in that specialty... The degree should be awarded for completion of a coherent program designed to assure the mastery of specified knowledge and skills, rather than for the random accumulation of a certain number of course credits after attaining the baccalaureate.
The master's degree is customarily awarded to an aspirant who achieves a level of academic accomplishment substantially beyond that required for the baccalaureate degree. The master's program should consist of a coherent pattern of courses frequently capped by comprehensive examinations and a thesis or its equivalent in a creative project. Ideally, all master's programs would include an opportunity for the student to learn to present information in written and oral form to a variety of audiences...
The Ph.D. degree, on the other hand, should be an original and significant contribution of knowledge to the field. In this respect, substantial portions of all Ph.D. dissertations should be publishable in peer-reviewed literature. Again quoting from the National Research Council's book Engineering Graduate Education and Research,
The doctoral program is designed to prepare a student for a lifetime of intellectual inquiry that manifests itself in creative scholarship and research, often leading to careers in social, governmental, business, and industrial organizations as well as the more traditional careers in university and college teaching. The program emphasizes freedom of inquiry and expression and the development of the student's capacity to make significant contributions to knowledge. An essential element is the development of the ability to understand and evaluate critically the literature of the field and to apply appropriate principles and procedures to the recognition, evaluation, interpretation, and understanding of issues and problems at the frontiers of knowledge.
A dissertation is universally required in U.S. universities for the doctor's degree. The purpose of the dissertation is twofold: (1) to develop in the candidate the independent ability to carry out a scholarly investigation of a challenging topic at a high level of professional ability, and (2) to provide for an original contribution to knowledge in the field. A nearly universal doctoral requirement is a comprehensive examination consisting of written and oral parts, generally imposed just before the candidate begins work on the dissertation. The purpose of the examination is to demonstrate an adequate knowledge of the field and an ability to use academic resources.
Your research topic should be chosen carefully. The project should contribute to your education in three essential ways:
- some theoretical understanding - a "why" component - of the problem
- an understanding of the relationship of the problem to the general body of knowledge, and
- creative and independent scientific problem-solving skills
Your work must contain an element of your own creativity. This creativity may take the form of new engineering applications of existing principles rather than new scientific knowledge, but an original contribution is a distinguishing feature of all graduate research. Thus, a thesis is not a descriptive essay, a narration of unimportant findings, or an application of a theory to another test case.
1.2 - Graduate Student Evaluation
As in any degree program, evaluation of your progress against program objectives is essential in assuring that you successfully obtain the desired education and degree. Evaluations will always have subjective components, but the department has tried to establish a complete set of evaluation criteria and performance indicators upon which to make fair evaluations. The following six categories are used by the faculty for evaluations:
- Undergraduate performance
- Knowledge of chemical engineering fundamentals
- Ability to solve problems using an integration or synthesis of chemical engineering basics
- Individual creativity
- Continual progress toward solution of the research problem
- Oral and written communication skills
Criterion 1 was used to evaluate your potential for success in our program before you were admitted for graduate studies in our department. Your undergraduate records and recommendations from faculty at your undergraduate institution were carefully evaluated, and your admission to the program is based on the faculty's confidence in you. The faculty wants you to be successful and will help you achieve your goals.
Procedures and exams within the graduate program are specifically designed to help the faculty evaluate each of the remaining five criteria. These procedures are evaluation checkpoints. The specific items and procedures...
- are:
- Comprehensive exam - called qualifying exam for Ph.D. candidates (2, 3)
- Graduate course grades (2)
- Prospectus (4, 5, 6)
- Advisory committee semi-annual evaluations (5)
- Thesis/dissertation defense (4, 5, 6)
The connection between these programs and the evaluation objectives are listed in parentheses above. For example, the comprehensive exam covering the integration of material covered in the department's three core courses are used to evaluate criteria 2 and 3 above. The faculty's evaluation of your research prospectus is used to evaluate criteria 4, 5, and 6. Each of these programs is discussed in Sections 2 - 4.
By your performance in these five areas, you will have a good idea of how you are doing with respect to the evaluation areas or objectives. Besides semi-annual evaluations (item D above) there are specific formal evaluation times when important decisions concerning your status or progress are made by the faculty. This normally only occurs twice for M.S. students: at admission and at the oral thesis defense. In the case of Ph.D. students, four composite evaluations are made: at admission, at admission to candidacy, at the Ph.D. prospectus defense, and at the oral dissertation defense.