SELF STUDY REPORT
Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences
Program Review
1996
I.Overview of the Department
A.Brief description
The Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences is a classical aerospace engineering department, created from an aeronautical engineering program in the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1947, under the leadership of Professor Karl D. Wood. From an original emphasis on aircraft design, aerodynamics and related aeronautical subjects, the Department became predominantly space oriented in the last decade. Currently, there are 24 regular faculty, approximately 250 undergraduate students, and 160 graduate students. The areas of specialization are roughly two-thirds astronautics (space) related, and one-third aeronautics related.
B.Outstanding characteristics
The Department is known for its strong research programs and attendant doctoral program. The research programs have been utilized to provide a significant research component to the undergraduate academic program. Departmental programs are noteworthy for their integration of experiment and theory.
C.Role and mission within the University
The Department plays an important role in the space emphasis of the University. It hosts four centers which conduct interdisciplinary programs that span several colleges and institutes. These features enable the Department to contribute to the aims of the University Strategic Plan.
D.Programs offered
Through the College of Engineering, the Department offers the Bachelor of Science degree. Through the Graduate School, it offers the Master of Science, Master of Engineering, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. The undergraduate degree provides more space emphasis than the majority of aerospace programs. The graduate degrees are offered in four specialty areas: aero-, gas and fluid dynamics, astrodynamics and remote sensing, controls and systems, as well as structures and materials. In addition, there is an interdisciplinary specialty in bioengineering.
E.Personnel
The Department has rostered 24 tenure-track faculty (20 of whom are tenured), and 1 faculty rostered elsewhere: 3 assistant professors, 4 associate professors, and 18 professors. There are four research faculty: two research associate professors and two research assistant professors. There are approximately 20 affiliated faculty from other units and nearby industry or research facilities, and approximately 20 postdoctoral research associates. These are supported by 14 staff who provide administrative and technical assistance.
F.National reputation
In 1995, The National Research Council ranked the Department’s faculty as the thirteenth best in the country. The Department was ranked by the NRC as first among aerospace programs in improvement over the last five years. Also in 1995, the U.S. News and World Report survey of engineering deans ranked the Department’s graduate program fourteenth in the nation.
G.Financial status
The Department has the highest research expenditures of any Boulder Campus department, with over $9,000,000 in FY ‘96, and over $47,000,000 over the past six years. The Department’s revenue to cost per full-time equivalent student is the best among engineering departments in the College when compared with the AAU Public Institutions. Research expenditures per faculty member are larger than those of any other department on the Boulder Campus.
H.Placement of graduates
Nearly all students graduating with M.S., M.E., or Ph.D. degrees are placed in good positions in industry, government, or universities. Approximately 5% of Ph.D. students are awarded regular faculty positions at other universities. A high proportion of Ph.D. graduates go to positions at research laboratories.
The Department runs an effective placement program (particularly for students receiving B.S. degrees), created in response to the difficult employment environment in recent years. As a result of this program, the Department’s graduates have been successful in obtaining challenging positions in a highly competitive environment. Despite the recent contraction of the aerospace industry, nearly all B.S. degree recipients have been placed within a short time of graduation.
III.Review Criteria
A.Quality
1. Teaching
The Department prides itself on the quality of its teaching. Four of its faculty have won the College’s Charles A. Hutchinson Teaching Award, including two in the last five years. The 1996 outstanding teacher in the College is Assistant Professor Brian Argrow, who also received the W. M. Keck Foundation Engineering Teaching Excellence Award in 1995.
In 1994, all of the College’s engineering departmentsreceived the highest level of national accreditation given. The ABET report for Aerospace Engineering Sciences stated, “The quality of the laboratory experiences is excellent. The faculty appears keenly aware of the ‘hands-on’ component of the curriculum and makes a concerted effort to integrate this into the undergraduate program.” This report also notes the positive impact on teaching that the faculty’s research has: “They are commended for developing a strong research program in support of the curriculum.”
The faculty of the Department have been aggressive in participating in special undergraduate academic programs, including the Undergraduate Excellence Fund, and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Since the initial conception of the College’s Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory, the Department has led the way in many aspects of this comprehensive change in the undergraduate academic philosophy. Members of the Aerospace faculty chaired the groups developing fluids, systems, thermodynamics, and measurements sections of this innovative curriculum project. The Department faculty have thus far taught 8 of 18 sections of the College’s ITLL Freshman Projects course (containing nearly half of the 327 students) and a substantial fraction of the new College Freshman Computing course. Half of the College’s new multidisciplinary Senior Projects course will be taught by Aerospace’s faculty. Professors Peterson and Bedard are structuring their sections around a national design competition. Through the Department, the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research and the Colorado Space Grant Consortium are teaching a high school outreach program funded by NASA that involves high school students in research conducted by the Department’s faculty and students.
2. Research
In research, both in quality and quantity, the Department ranks among the best in the nation. In each of the last six years, the Department has ranked among the top half dozen aerospace engineering departments in the nation as measured by total research expenditures, research expenditures per faculty member, and Ph.D. degrees granted. For the past three years, overhead-bearing research expenditures in the Department have exceeded $8,000,000, making it a near tie for first in the University with three other departments (MCDB, Electrical Engineering, and Chemistry). In FY 95, research expenditures were $8,852,906, rising to $9,107,760 in FY 96. New awards for the past year exceeded $12,000,000, indicating continued growth.
3. Faculty and Graduate Program
The National Research Council in 1995 ranked the Department’s faculty quality as the thirteenth best in the nation. The Department was among four programs at the University ranked in the top twenty. The Department was ranked first among aerospace programs in improvement over the last five years. In 1995, the U.S. News and World Report ranked the Department’s graduate program fourteenth in the nation.
In the last four years, the Department has averaged over twenty Ph.D.’s granted per year. In nearly every case the new Ph.D. has been placed in a responsible position at a government laboratory, industry, or another university. The Department has a good record of placement of all its graduates, both with graduate and undergraduate degrees. The Department is dissatisfied with the number of its Ph.D.’s joining academe.
4. Curriculum
The curriculum, both graduate and undergraduate, has been regularly reviewed and improved. Currently, the graduate curriculum has finished its first year of a major revision, and the undergraduate curriculum is in the midst of a significant change incorporating the new ideas of the College’s Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory, and the new demands of engineering fields of today.
B.Centrality
In 1984, President Arnold Weber announced his Space Initiative. The following year, President Gordon Gee adopted this Space Initiative as his own, and declared this Department to be the “gemstone in the crown” of his drive to make this the Space University of the nation. The administration invested in this Department with good results. Today this Campus is one of three or four with valid claims as the Space University of the nation, when one considers the combined strength of APAS, LASP, and Aerospace Engineering Sciences.
The Department has had outstanding success in interdisciplinary research with strong cross-campus programs including BioServe Space Technologies (BST), the Center for Aerospace Structures (CAS), the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR), the Center for Space Construction (CSC), the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC), participation inthe Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (PAOS), and an informal interdisciplinary program in remote sensing. In addition, aerospace students play a major role in the Colorado Space Grant College.
Through its interdisciplinary research, its contributions to the Space Initiative, and its contribution to the general engineering curriculum through ITLL, the Department plays key roles in achieving the aims of the UCB Strategic plan.
C.Student demand
Student demand for aerospace engineering has long been cyclical. At the peak of the last cycle, for five years (1988-1992), the Department had the largest number of undergraduate majors in the College:
19861987198819891990199119921993199419951996
583 648 660 615 623 549 477 380 314 256 227
The downturn in undergraduate enrollment lags behind a similar national drop in aerospace engineering majors. The Department’s number of majors has remained 50% higher than the national average for aerospace engineering departments, which was 150 in 1995 (Appendix G). A bright spot in the enrollment problem came in the Fall, 1996, freshman class. It showed a significant increase to 62 (or 11.3% of the class), up from 51 (or 8.8% of the freshman class) in 1995.
Graduate enrollment in the Department has shown a dramatic increase since the University’s Space Initiative commenced in 1984. Full-time graduate enrollment at fall census:
19861987198819891990199119921993199419951996
47 62 80 151 169 187 196 201 176 155 157
This does not include approximately 35 part-time graduate students each year. The average graduate enrollment in aerospace engineering graduate programs in 1995 was 85 (ADCA/AIAA Enrollment Survey, Appendix G).
The degrees granted reflect these trends:
B.S.M.S. and M.E.Ph.D.
FY 86 7214 8
FY 87 7522 2
FY 88 8023 4
FY 8911121 6
FY 901093811
FY 911117216
FY 9210345 6
FY 93 867723
FY 94 945716
FY 95 814726
FY 96 693018
These enrollment and graduation numbers place the Department in the top six in the nation by size.
D.Uniqueness
With the exception of the Air Force Academy, the Department offers the only undergraduate program in aerospace engineering in Colorado, and, without exception, the only graduate program in aerospace engineering in Colorado. The graduate program has been recognized (based on uniqueness and quality) by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education (WICHE) for student exchange throughout the fourteen state region.
The Department has research and graduate programs that are amongworld leaders in aerospace structural dynamics and control, atmospheric and ocean remote sensing, bioengineering in space, computational, solid, and fluid mechanics, global positioning technologies, microgravity fluid mechanics, ocean modeling, precise orbit determination, satellite remote sensing, and space debris.
IV. Teaching Programs and Student Concerns
A. Outcomes assessment
The Department’s existing outcomes assessment is based on national standard examinations. All students are required to take either the Engineer-in-Training examination, or the Graduate Record Examination. The Colorado Commission on Higher Education has recently changed the outcomes assessment requirement. In response, the Department is currently developing expanded plans in conjunction with the College of Engineering. The new outcomes assessment methods will measure broader student capabilities in analysis, design, teamwork, and communication skills. This will provide more detailed feedback on the quality of the curriculum and its delivery.
In addition, the Department conducted a survey of Aerospace alumni (limited to the past ten years) in the Fall of 1995, with 99 responses received out of the 670 requests mailed. Both the number of responses and the level of detail in the responses were encouraging. Questions ranged from the general level of preparedness provided by the curriculum to specific issues in curriculum reform. Alumni seem genuinely interested and willing to help assess our program.
The Department plans to conduct periodic surveys of this type, which will provide an additional means of outcomes assessment.
Current senior survey results are presented in Appendix G, and summarized in section C (2) below.
B. Placement of graduates
The Department has kept comprehensive records on the placement of graduates since the Spring of 1995. Over the last three semesters 108 B.S. degrees have been awarded, and the employment status of 90 of these is known. Thirty percent have gone to graduate schools, 60% have found jobs in industry or with government laboratories, and 10% are fulfilling commitments to the Armed Forces. Graduate schools accepting Department graduates include Alabama, University of Pennsylvania, M.I.T., as well as Colorado. Industry placements include large national companies such as Boeing, TRW, Hughes, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas and Honeywell, and also include a strong Colorado industry representation; i.e. Lockheed Martin, Ball Aerospace, United Airlines and Aerospace Design and Development.
In 1993 one of the Department’s graduates received a Rhodes scholarship and is currently in graduate school at Oxford. Of the 14 University of Colorado graduates who have been astronauts, 8 of them received their degrees from this Department.
The majority of students going on to graduate school do so at CU, with most remaining in the Aerospace Department. Although some go on to other first-rank universities such as MIT, it is not clear whether most stay here at CU due to the many opportunities for research assistantships, or due to their inability to compete nationally.
Before the period detailed above, the national industry was in a down-sizing cycle. Based on the recollection of the undergraduate academic advisor, many students did compete successfully for traditional aerospace positions, but many also found opportunities in other fields such as software development. Despite the rather narrow impression that people may have of aerospace engineering, the Department’s graduates are apparently quite well-rounded engineers, who are attractive to a variety of industries.
C.The undergraduate program
1. The New Undergraduate Curriculum
The engineering career is changing. Success depends on adaptability, communication and teamwork skills, and lifelong learning. The curriculum must provide a more rounded, integrated exposure to engineering science which includes hands-on work with physical systems and computational tools, as well as additional experience in oral and written communication and teamwork.
The approach is characterized by a more integrated core curriculum, with enhanced upper division elective flexibility. The sophomore year is revamped, integrating previously separate introductory courses in mechanics, thermodynamics, materials, and fluids by focusing on interdisciplinary design problems with significant experimental and computational components. Upper division requirements are reduced, allowing wider choices in technical electives to suit increasingly diverse student interests and career opportunities.
This revision is made possible by the new approach in national accreditation requirements focusing on outcomes assessment rather than rigid curriculum structure. Lower current enrollment makes implementation of these changes feasible.
ITLL will be instrumental in providing significant hands-on and teamwork experiences to round-out this more integrated curriculum. While there is not a specific ITLL course, many of the core courses already are making use of ITLL pilot modules. The revised curriculum will depend on ITLL facilities and equipment to support additional laboratory components.
The departmental faculty have already strongly endorsed the overall goals and approach for the new curriculum. Work is underway to define the details of the integrated sophomore courses, resources needed, and faculty development requirements. The goal is to implement this new curriculum beginning in the Fall of 1997.
2. Student activities and participation
Undergraduates in the Department participate in a number of professional and academic groups. The strongest of these is AIAA, which fosters student interaction between upper and lower division students, as well as contacts within industry. Monthly meetings focus on industry presentations and future career information. The chapter sponsors ten to twenty student paper entries in the District competition every year. Aerospace students also participate in the Society of Women Engineers, Sigma Gamma Tau, and the Engineering Council. Three times a year the Department organizes informational sessions for students covering undergraduate research opportunities, senior design lab topics, and aerospace elective courses.
The Department sponsors Pizza Networking Seminars several times a year to introduce students to faculty research and special elective courses related to faculty special interests. Student undergraduate research is highlighted at these seminars.
Two student representatives are regular members of the Department’s Curriculum and Teaching Committee. Three students are regular members of the Self Study Committee.
Recent senior survey results indicate that the Aerospace Department is providing a quality undergraduate experience. Seniors have indicated their strongest satisfaction is with clarity of degree requirements, availability of required courses, upper division instruction, and academic advising in the major. Seniors were least satisfied with career advising in the major, texts and instructional materials, lower division instruction, and faculty concern for students. However, over the last few years, seniors have reported an increasing level of satisfaction with academic and career advising, and availability of research opportunities.
3. Undergraduate research
The Department helps undergraduates arrange for participation in faculty research through independent study, paid research assistance positions, and the University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). More than 10% of aerospace students are involved in UROP, with the Department’s students comprising the largest percentage of any department on campus. Numerous opportunities exist for students to work with actual space systems and research through the HOMER project, Space Grant College (where 23 of 55 undergraduate participants are aerospace majors), and BioServe projects where 30-35% of the work force is undergraduates. Fifteen to twenty percent of undergraduate students participate in independent study each semester. Coordination of these activities, along with Co-op and Summer Intern programs, is handled by the Student Advisor.