Prospective Students Issue

Highlights from the College of Engineering

Campus living and learning com-munities accommodate more than one-third of our first-year class. Two programs provide residence hall space dedicated to engineering students and offer educational, sup-port, and entertainment programs geared specifically to engineering.

Two very active programs, the Multicultural Engineering Program and the Women in Engineering Program, offer counseling, tutoring, and academic assistance. They also

provide professional development opportunities through the National Society of Black Engineers, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and Society of Women Engineers.

Many engineering students take engineering and other coursework through the campus honors program, known as the Commonwealth Honors College, which offers students who qualify accelerated coursework in a challenging environment.

The UMass Amherst College of Engineering offers six fully accredited Bachelor of Science degrees: chemical, civil, computer systems, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering.

The College of Engineering is the highest-ranked public engineering program in New England, according to U.S. News & World Report. It’s a distinction that we’ve held since 1994, when U.S. News started ranking engineering programs.

In coordination with the Isenberg School of Management, we offer a 15-credit minor in Engineering Management, one of only a few such minors in the country. This course of study is invaluable for the many budding engineers who go on to business careers or to their own entrepreneurial ventures.

The college boasts a 15-to-one student-to-faculty ratio at the undergraduate level. We enroll approximately 1,500 undergraduates and have a faculty of almost 100. You get the best of both worlds: the intimacy of a small college within the dynamic and diverse environment of a major university.

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Our Engineering Career Planning Center enables students to work for leading companies such as Raytheon, General Electric, General Dynamics, IBM, Westinghouse, Bose, Camp Dresser & McKee, Chubb, ExxonMobil, PTC, Johnson

& Johnson, and many others. The center offers student workshops for resume and cover-letter writing, career fair preparation, and interview skills. It also connects students with employers through job and internship announcements,

Student Engineers Install Well in Kenya

The Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has reached an historic landmark in its six-year-old Kenya Water Project by drilling a $15,000 borehole for a new well that the organization has been rais-ing money for since 2006. The EWB worked on the deep-drilled well and about 15 water-bearing spring boxes to create a clean drinking supply for several thousand people in the Namawanga area of western Kenya.

“Vroom Vroom” Gets a Cool 828 mpg

Vroom Vroom Carbon Fiber 1 (VVCF-1), the 2010 entry for the UMass Amherst Supermileage Team in the Society of Automotive Engineers national supermileage competition last June, finished a very respectable eighth in the field of 33 teams by logging an impressive 828 mpg. It was a big improvement over

the performance of VVCF-1 last year, which did 536 mpg in the same competition. The inner mechanical workings of VVCF-1, which won the award for “Vehicle with the Greatest Visual Appeal” in 2009, were thoroughly modified to produce the jump in mpg this year.

Engineer Vaults onto Academic All-Conference Team

The A-10 Conference named Junior Sean Busch of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

to its Academic All-Conference Team for his strong academic and athletic performance during the indoor track and field season. Busch also won the 2010 UMass Amherst Winter Male Scholar-Athlete Award

Spotlight on Students

career fairs, company information sessions, networking events, interview scheduling, and plant tours.

The campus Study Abroad Program offers opportunities to experience other cultures while taking engineer-ing and general education courses at universities in Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, and others.

The College of Engineering has an annual scholarship program through which approximately $350,000 is awarded to talented and deserving students studying engineering at UMass Amherst.

boasting an aggregate deflection of only five-eighths of an inch. The approximately 20-foot scale model also weighed in at a relatively feathery 248.8 pounds.

How to Make a Quantum Dot

Chemical engineering major Brendan Walker performed some critical research on those strange and wonderful quantum dots. These

luminescent nanoparticles promise to revolutionize medical diagnostic devices, photovoltaic cells, and many industries from healthcare to home entertainment. Walker worked on the leading edge of quantum-dot research, helping to scale up a new production process from the lab bench to large-scale chemical reactors required to create quantum dots at the industrial level.

Engineers Lead Swim Team to Championship

Two mechanical engineering stu-dents led the UMass men’s swim-ming team to its fourth-straight Atlantic 10 Championship. Juan Moliere garnered a gold medal in the 50-meter freestyle and a silver in the 100-meter freestyle. Michael Berthaume had a first-place in the 100-meter butterfly and a third-place in the 200-meter butterfly. Both students also starred on the winning 400-meter medley relay team.

M5, to launch their own enterprising recording studio, which looks to attract lots of business from local musical groups who have trouble finding affordable recording facilities. The new student business is named Studio M5, and is already attracting recording artists ranging from a classical music professor, to an acappella group, to a funk band.

Building a Bridge to Her Future

Undergraduate Aimee O’Brien of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department was the co-captain of the UMass Amherst Steel Bridge Team that managed a strong fourth-place finish out of 12 teams at the regional Student Steel Bridge

Competition, run by the American Institute of Steel Construction. The double-girder bridge took first place in the key stiffness category,

by posting a GPA of 3.75, setting the university’s individual record for the indoor pole vault at 15’9”, and winning the A-10 Championship in that event.

Soph Pays “Rent” with Part-time Occupation

Chemical engineering sophomore Kevin Cunningham has an offbeat method for relaxing from the trials and tribulations of his extremely demanding major. Last spring, he appeared in the UMass Theatre Guild’s production of Rent, based loosely on Giacomo Puccini’s opera, La Boheme. Rent tells the story of a group of young artists and musicians, many with HIV/AIDS, struggling to survive in New York City’s Lower East Side.

Engineer Turned Pats Cheerleader

Patricia Fox, a 2010 graduate in civil engineering, was one of 25 women who qualified for the New England Patriots Cheerleaders last spring. Fox, who was a member of the UMass Amherst Dance Team for four years, is a Renaissance woman whose passions range from historic preservation – the field she desires to work in as a professional engineer – to Engineers Without Borders.

Students Launch Recording Studio

Six students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department took advantage of an innovative departmental learning center, called

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Student Works on Diabetes Treatment

A senior chemical engineering major was a vital cog in a research team working toward the successful treat-ment of diabetes and other killer dis-eases. Meenal Datta performed key

experiments on polymer capsules en-gineered to carry insulin-producing pancreas cells for implanting in type 1 diabetics. This procedure would in-ject or implant encapsulated, insulin-secreting, islets of Langerhans cells to treat the disease. The technique would be as effective as, but much safer than, a pancreas transplant.

The Cure for Common Absent-mindedness

With our human tendency toward forgetfulness in mind, a team of electrical engineering students designed a technology called Stuff Tracker, which allows anybody with a Smartphone to monitor the location of valuable objects carried around on a daily basis. Stuff

Tracker reduces the problem of forgetting or losing critical personal items such as house keys, purses, wallets, laptops, and mobile phones.

For information about the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, visit our website at http://www.ecs.umass.edu/.