“We hire for one reason: to get something done. M.Eng. graduates generally hit the ground running. They have more problem-solving and interdisciplinary skills, and they are better able to integrate into an organization,” says Kevin Weitsman (B.S. 1972; Master of Engineering (Electrical) 1973). He served as a Cornell recruiting campus manager for 25 years, first with Hewlett Packard and later with Agilent; Weitsman and his team hired more than two hundred young professionals. “Employers typically think of M.Eng. graduates as having the equivalent of a year's work experience. When you're hiring people to get some traction in your organization, a 10 or 15 percent boost in starting salary for that added capability seems like a bargain.”
Weitsman's point of view reflects a growing trend. Nationwide, those who enter the workforce with a Master of Engineering degree in electrical and computer engineering can expect to earn starting salaries on average 13 percent higher than those with bachelor's degrees in the same fields. Cornell degrees command substantially higher salaries, with a nearly 15 percent boost from the professional master's degree even over our own bachelor's degree.
As ECE Master of Engineering Program Director John Belina points out, the Cornell M.Eng. degree provides a better platform for advancement. “You're not only likely to earn a higher salary throughout your working life, but you also have enhanced opportunities for a more rewarding career.” That has certainly proven true for Fernando “Dito” Garcia (M.Eng. 1991, M.B.A. 1992). “I started my career exactly where I wanted to, in product development,” he says, “and my M.Eng. provided the ideal preparation.” He has advanced steadily at Kodak, moving through increasingly larger product development and general management roles.
Staying Ahead of the Curve:
Continually Renewing the Curriculum
Since the program's inception in the late 1960s, the Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) has graduated more than 3,300 individuals with a Master of Engineering degree. Enrollments of 80 or more students per year reflect market demand. “In our undergraduate engineering program, we focus on the fundamentals,” says ECE Director Clif Pollock. “In this master's program, our strategy is first to provide specialized technical design with plenty of rigor, especially with a systems perspective, and second to give students a chance to learn about project planning, effective communication, and professional teamwork.”
The rigorous M.Eng. curriculum is continuously renewed to meet and anticipate market needs. “Our Master of Engineering is quite a different degree program today than it was ten years ago,” says Belina. “But that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows us. Anticipating market needs and staying out in front is a way of life for us.” The program currently offers three special focus concentrations: ECE Technical Management, Energy Systems, and Complex Systems Design. Most students, however, tailor their own programs, choosing courses and project components to optimize their career goals.
What are the distinguishing features of ECE's Master of Engineering program, version 2008? At the top of the list are the program's unusual degree of flexibility and the professional projects. Today's M.Eng. prepares graduates for rewarding careers in a wide range of industries: from high-speed silicon hardware to high-power financial software, from undersea fibers to geosynchronous satellites, from national power grids to energy-saving LEDs, from computerized medical instrumentation that looks into the human body to radar systems that look out to the heavens. Our M.Eng. education uniquely provides the skills, knowledge, and opportunities to experience working on many of today's big problems.
Making choices within a highly flexible curriculum turns out to be a challenge not unlike some that students will face later on. “Having a lot of freedom to choose my courses was sometimes frustrating; it's a lot easier to have one-stop shopping!” says Jason Christopher, M.Eng. 2007. “But when you realize you have such an abundance of resources, it's a great thing.” Christopher, who came to Cornell to study energy systems and renewable energy, was able to tailor his program to meet those goals by combining courses from ECE and several other Cornell schools, and he also added in Entrepreneurship for Engineers and Operations Management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management.
The M.Eng. project is the primary vehicle to provide students with substantive problem-solving and teamwork experiences and opportunities to develop advanced design skills. For example, Aaron Nathan, Adam Shapiro, and others are hard at work on a multidisciplinary design project: Cornell's entry into the DARPA Urban Challenge. In their contribution to the Team Cornell vehicle, these students are using a dozen duo-core processors to interpret signals from sonic, optical, and laser sensors. Collectively, these signals will enable safe autonomous operation of the vehicle. Says John Belina, program director. “This whole project is a wonder of electronics and artificial intelligence. Our students are getting to work on incredible leading-edge technologies.”
Last year, Chimaobi Onwuchekwa and Bjarni Jonsson undertook the M.Eng. project in context of another forward-looking, multidisciplinary effort: a green development in Hawaii (see Sustainable Community, pg 6). Bjarni Jonsson was excited not only about his own work exploring power-management opportunities associated with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, but also about the cross-disciplinary nature of the project. “I got experience working in a real environment where I had to work with people who had different backgrounds,” he says. “I learned how to explain things that seemed obvious to me but are not part of their background—and they did the same for me.”
M.Eng. projects generally prove their worth in the real world. For Mike Willhoff (M.Eng. 2004), that happened fairly soon. He says his work on the Cornell ICE Cube satellite “really gave me a leg up” on the job at Aerospace Corporation. At Cornell, he learned not just what goes into making a satellite but also why things are done to military standards. This year at Aerospace, he had an opportunity to serve as co-investigator on a research and development project, working with a small team to design, prototype, and build a power system for a small satellite. “Some of what I learned in my project at Cornell I applied to my project here at Aerospace, and it resulted in my giving a paper at a conference.”
Most students find the whole M.Eng. experience to be greater than the sum of its parts. As Kevin Weitsman says, “Product engineers—which is where I started—live in the white spaces. They don't own anything in any one discipline; they glue them all together. The M.Eng. prepares you to do that. And from that foundation, you can follow paths that take you outside of your discipline and have success in multiple careers. I'm convinced that my M.Eng. experience helped me to become broad enough to appreciate all the things around me and keep on growing.” He has, and he did. And so have several thousand others.