Letters to the Editor
- PDF / 239,044 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 576 x 777.6 pts Page_size
- 29 Downloads / 170 Views
Educational Priorities of Graduate Education in MSE Must Undergo Reforms To the Editor: Your Public Affairs Forum by Julia Phillips ["NSF Workshop on Graduate Education Examines Needs for the 21st Century," August 1995, p. 13] raised a number of important issues concerning graduate education in materials science and engineering (MSE). Since World War H thefieldof MSE has matured into a discipline in its own right. The conceptual foundations of the subject, experimental techniques, and theoretical/modeling tools span the dominant materials classes of metals, ceramics, semiconductors, and polymers. Of course, the discipline of MSE is very broad and physicists, chemists, and engineers continue to contribute to its development. But broadly applicable experimental techniques now exist to synthesize and process an enormous range of materials. Well-established techniques of characterization and modeling may also be applied to analyze their structures and properties over a wide range of length scales. At the same time materials-based industries are demanding trained personnel with increased flexibility and breadth to cope with the increasing diversity and complexity of the design and manufacture of functional and structural materials systems for engineering applications. Thefieldof MSE is now sufficiently developed that this demand can be met. Julia Phillips has raised the question of whether it is met by the current structure of the PhD program, with its focus on a narrowly defined research project. The most significant aspect of the current PhD program is that it provides training in research and independent study. However, it has serious deficiencies. Since MSE has always been a highly interdisciplinaryfield,a significant fraction of students starting PhD work have first degrees in physics, chemistry, engineering, or some discipline other than MSE. It is quite normal to find that many of these
students, through no fault of theirs, have little or no conception of basic concepts in materials science such as a stress-strain relation, a dislocation, a temperature-composition phase diagram, a point group, or how a transistor works. And yet many of these students complete their PhD programs and are turned out into the market place without much exposure to many of these basic concepts. Clearly, it is desirable that all PhD candidates in MSE acquire a minimum level of knowledge in MSE before they compete for jobs. This could be achieved by requiring that all such students pass a set of core courses covering the fundamentals and engineering applications of materials. For example, these core courses could be: (i) structure of materials (equilibrium and nonequilibrium aspects); (ii) mechanical properties; (iii) electrical, optical, and magnetic properties; and (iv) applications of engineering materials. Of course, this core course content could be packaged in alternative ways. There is also a case to be made for a program of more advanced graduate courses which would broaden each student's knowledge of his/her chosen specialty. F
Data Loading...
