Program  Branding

Reflect on your program as a whole: its course offerings, availability, modes of delivery, faculty strengths, opportunities for unique student experience (travel, research, internship, campus social interaction), clarity of the nature of the program and its potential for impact on students’ lives as you respond to the following:

1. If you were a student entering McNeese what features would keep you in the program?

The faculty of the Department of Engineering Technology take pride in helping deliver McNeese’s slogan of

“Excellence With a Personal Touch” to our students. We deliver on McNeese’s slogan for our students not only when we provide hands-on teaching and labs, but in one-on-one advising each semester, assisting them with job placement, in teaching them the value of producing good work in a timely fashion, and in providing them the opportunity to do work with lab and project partners.

o From the point of view of an entering freshman, we would keep the following features of our program:

 Continue hiring faculty with industrial experience. Most of our current faculty has extensive industrial experience that they share with their students in and out of the classroom.

 Continue to provide a variety of course offerings at convenient times. Course offerings and times are adjusted to meet the students changing needs. Evening courses are offered on a need basis upon student request.

 Continue to use various modes of course delivery. Engineering faculty teach courses using a variety of delivery modes that are generally suited to the class and materials being taught.

 Maintain small class sizes. Our class sizes are small and this allows the student more contact with the professor and more freedom to ask questions in class. There is a feeling of personal involvement of the faculty with

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students’ educational goals. Having small class sizes appears to be one of the reasons students prefer our program over other engineering programs in the state with much bigger classes.

 Continue to have faculty teaching all engineering courses. All courses and laboratories are currently taught by faculty rather than graduate students. We do not have any graduate teaching assistants in the department.

 Maintain updated laboratory facilities. Most of our laboratories are adequately equipped with modern

equipment. The department has invested more than $2.5M during the last five years in facility upgrades through industry donations, grant funding, TASC funding as well as general McNeese equipment acquisitions.

 Maintain collaboration with industry. The Engineering Department provides an industry focused education as well as many opportunities for students to network with industry personnel such as: guest speakers, industry tours, senior design project sponsorship, etc.

 Maintain the interdisciplinary nature of our program. Our “one program – four concentration” mode gives the students the opportunity to experience the interdisciplinary nature of engineering in the real world.

 Expand our on-line course offerings. Although a full 100% on-line undergraduate engineering program is not feasible at this time, there are definite opportunities to increase our on-line course inventory.

 Maintain and expand our collaboration with the Department of Engineering. Engineering Technology students can improve their knowledge and experience by an increased exposure to engineering teaching equipment.

The two main factors that should keep a student enrolled in our program are the excellence of our programs and how they serve SWLA.

a) Equipment: ABET has complimented us on our facilities and equipment during accreditation visits. Our building and labs are fairly new and kept in good working order. Though grants, TASC money, LEQSF money, sharing of equipment with the Engineering Dept., and as a result of Rita, most of laboratories are adequately equipped and have modern facilities.

b) Accreditation: Despite not having ever being accredited before 2002, the ET programs have been granted the full 6-year accreditation period without any noteworthy findings, interim reports, or interim visits. There are more ABET-accredited degrees in Electronics than in any other ET field, and it is very difficult to get a clean accreditation final

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report, which we have done both in 2002 and 2008! Electronics is a large field of study - consider the huge field of Electrical Engineering as a parallel field – but graduates of our program receive not some kind of watered-down training or technical school, but a broad and rigorous degree that prepares them for a lifetime of learning and work.

As of June 2010, MSU has the only ABET-accredited A.S. program in Instrumentation in the Gulf Coast region, and aside from the University of Houston, have the only ABET-accredited B.S. programs in Instrumentation in the nation.

SWLA – and the whole Gulf Coast – has a continuing need for Instrumentation technicians, and in particular a need by some companies for B.S.-level graduates in Instrumentation. Despite other two-year programs in the region, MSU remains the only ABET-accredited program at the A.S. level.

Despite a number of Process Technology programs at 2-year colleges and technical schools on the Gulf Coast, MSU has one of the oldest such programs and is the only program that is accredited by ABET. In fact it is the only program related to the field of Chemical Engineering Technology in the United States!

Accreditation may not mean that much to our students, but it should. In our experience, they are far more prepared after two years to continue their education to similar students graduating our rival institutions.

c) Faculty: Our faculty meet the ABET definition of basic credentials, which requires three years of relevant

industrial experience and either a master's degree in engineering or engineering technology or a master's degree in a closely related field if the degree is primarily analytical and the subject clearly appropriate. The faculty members in the program meet the requirements on paper, have a wealth of teaching and industrial experience, teach nearly all of labs sections in the program (rather than using graduate students from engineering), providing students with consistent lab experience semester after semester. The department also requires students to be advised until graduation, and with use of the degree plans, flow charts and other documents that describe the program, very few advising problems occur.

d) Job Placement Assistance: The Engineering Technology department and MSU Career Services Center have an excellent working relationship and work together in selecting companies for career fairs, arranging rooms for on-campus testing and presentations, recruiting potential companies for hiring graduate and co-op positions, organizing interview skills workshops, working with the Career Services office in encouraging students to register with Career Services, and contacting students regarding potential openings and interviews.

2. How, when, and how often are the best features of your program communicated to students, and how would you improve upon that communication?

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The features of our program are communicated during high school recruiting visits, high school career fairs, during orientation sessions, Freshman Foundations, during other freshman classes, and during advising. We aren’t going to offer statistics, but most students successfully completing the first two classes in each degree program nearly always graduate. An improvement to our recruiting materials - incorporating testimonies of past graduates – along with a better identification of where graduates work and how their careers unfold, would be a start. We then need to take that information into high school recruiting forums and into our freshman classes to not only increase incoming students, but increase retention.

Each semester representatives from our LAIA visit Process introductory classes to discuss job qualifications, workplace expectations, and career paths. In these discussions, students learn some of our program’s best feature directly from potential employers. Such discussions include: transferability of credits, benefits of the BS degree, and opportunity to work while pursuing the last 2 years of the BS thanks to our department’s non-traditional course offerings.

Some feedback on best features of the program occurs during industry interactions with our students. The Process concentration hosts an Excellence in PTEC Day annually, where industry comes to observe and evaluate students in various levels of the program. The students demonstrate many pieces of process equipment and explain how it operates. Industry is able to ask questions and give feedback to the students. All students are evaluated on a rubric used by the industrial reps. This interaction helps the student to appreciate what they are learning, develop confidence in their knowledge and presentation abilities, and receive constructive feedback about their performance.

o We utilize an electronic messaging system with wall mounted TV monitors to announce co-op opportunities and other activities in the department.

o We publish a number of flyers for distribution such as the “Engineering Technology At A Glance” flyer that highlights many of our features and accomplishments, a Co-op flyer that describes the program, flyers with the degree programs for all concentrations, as well as seasonal flyers describing the features of grant funded programs available to

students.

o The Department of Engineering Technology maintains the most informative web page of all other departments at McNeese (http://www.mcneese.edu/ceet/engtech/). Students visiting our web page can get information about faculty, scholarships, facilities, student organizations, events, can download program flyers, and among other things, view the Body of Knowledge for all of our courses.

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o We can improve upon our communication by: publicizing the activities of students and faculty more to better recognize everybody’s effort, increase the student involvement with our student professional organizations, promote faculty-student mentoring activities, and organize events that faculty and faculty-students interact with each other outside the traditional classroom environment.