This spring, the IME’s four advisory boards met to discuss the future education of engineers. The boards, which include representatives from several corporations and organizations and IME faculty, discussed future trends in the workplace and assessed how to meet the changing educational and experiential needs of IME.
Groups re-presenting IME’s four under-grad-uate programs – manufacturing (MFT), engineer-ing graphics (EGR), engineering management (UEM), and industrial engineering (IE) – held meetings following the 38th Conference on Senior Engineering Design Projects (SEDP).
According to Dr. Mitchel Keil, the IME professor who chairs the EGR board, many members of the boards are WMU alums of the programs for which they now serve as advisors.
The boards considered current changes being suggested to the core curriculum to provide a common first-year program for all incoming freshmen engineering students and to organize them into cohorts. Under consideration also were the need for co-op experiences and international internships and potential changes in foreign language and calculus requirements.
Members also weighed the pros and cons of minors and options, the call to limit programs to 124 credit hours, and the inclusion of a 4 +1 program to allow a student to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years. They also reviewed enhancing the curriculum with topics such as product data management (PDM) and failure mode effects and analysis (FMEA).
IME professor Fred Sitkins said the MFT board agreed that the goal of education is changing from those proficient in manufacturing engineering to those proficient in manufacturing processes. “They want to hire those who understand the broad processes,” he said
Referencing the SEDP Conference that preceded the advisory meetings, IME professor Dr. Bob White said the IE Board agreed that “the IE projects were the best group of IE projects they’d seen at SEDP.”
SME Scholarship Funds Presented to Foundation
SME members pose with a $20,000 check donated to SME Foundation for scholarships. Left to right are Ron Jones, Dave Steffans, Bruce Burrows, Mitchel Keil, Erik Korbecki, Brian Cervin, Ryan Miller, SME Foundation Representative Bart Aslon, and IME Chair Paul Engelmann
Kalamazoo Chapter 116 of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) presented a check for $20,000 to the SME Foundation for Roscoe Douglas Scholarships (RDS). Ron Aslon, representing the SME Foundation, accepted the check and thanked the local organization.
In the past, Chapter 116 has supported RDS, which have been awarded by SME to full-time students who maintained a 3.0 GPA in either a manufacturing engineering or a technology program and who attended one of six approved Michigan institutions.
WMU’s most recent RDS recipients are Brian Cervin, Eric Korbecki, and Joshua Weise.
Next year, the IME department’s scholarship and publicity committee will determine how the RDS funds are distributed. Also all future RDS recipients must be WMU students.
The next official advisory board meetings are set for April 2007.
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