Volume II Issue 7
July 2006 |
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 Engineering
Heads Majors With Highest Average Starting Salaries
 In a job market that is seeing higher starting salary offers to new
college graduates, engineering majors can expect to see the highest
offers, on average, according to a report by the National Association of
Colleges and Employers (NACE). Engineering majors garnered the four
highest starting salary offers and five of the top-10 spots. In
addition, seven of the top-10 majors with the highest starting salary
offers saw increases in their offers over last year.
The following majors have the highest salaries paid to 2005-06 graduates
(average salary offers are in parentheses):
 Chemical
engineering ($55,900)
Computer
engineering ($54,877)
Electrical/electronics
and communications engineering, ($52,899)
Mechanical
engineering ($50,672)
Computer
science ($50,046)
Accounting
($45,723)
Economics/finance,
including banking ($45,191)
Civil
engineering ($44,999)
Business
administration/management ($39,850)
Marketing/marketing
management, including marketing research ($36,260)
College
Admissions Trends
 While
the country's most selective colleges are admitting fewer candidates, a
student's chance for admission to a four-year college is still
overwhelmingly good, according to the National Association for College
Admission Counseling's 2006 State of College Admission report. The
report found that colleges and universities admit seven out of ten
students who apply. Other trends noted in this year's report:
A
continued increase in applications to colleges and universities, fueled
by increasing numbers of high school graduates
A
marked increase in Early Decision and Early Action applications after
several years of decline
Grades
in rigorous courses, standardized admission test scores, and overall
grade point averages continue to be the top factors considered by
colleges in the admission decision.
Topics addressed in the
report include high school graduation and college enrollment,
applications to college, admission strategies, and financial aid.
Find out more...
Sloan
Career Cornerstone Center Offers PowerPoints
 At
the request of the many career counselors, educators, and other users of
the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center, PowerPoint presentations have been
developed to summarize every degree field profiled on the site.
The presentations may be downloaded and used by anyone wishing to share
career planning advice with students, graduates, or others interested in
exploring the varied career paths which lead from degrees in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, computing, and healthcare.
New PowerPoint presentations are also in the works to focus on issues
such as diversity, the importance of accreditation, paths for women,
precollege preparation, and coop and internship planning.
Find out more...
Degree
Profile: Chemical Engineering
 Chemical engineers work in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, healthcare,
design and construction, pulp and paper, petrochemicals, food
processing, specialty chemicals, polymers, biotechnology, and
environmental health and safety industries, among others.
Within these industries,
chemical engineers rely on their knowledge of mathematics and science,
particularly chemistry, to overcome technical problems safely and
economically. And, of course, they draw upon and apply their engineering
knowledge to solve any technical challenges they encounter. Don't make
the mistake of thinking that chemical engineers only make things,
though. Their expertise is also applied in the area of law, education,
publishing, finance, and medicine, as well as many other fields that
require technical training.
 Specifically, chemical
engineers improve food processing techniques, and methods of producing
fertilizers, to increase the quantity and quality of available food.
They also construct the synthetic fibers that make our clothes more
comfortable and water resistant; they develop methods to mass-produce
drugs, making them more affordable; and they create safer, more
efficient methods of refining petroleum products, making energy and
chemical sources more productive and cost effective. They also develop
solutions to environmental problems, such as pollution control and
remediation. And yes, they process chemicals, which are used to make or
improve just about everything you see around you.
Find out more about careers in
chemical engineering.
Student
Challenge: Build a Steel Bridge
 Almost
500 students from 45 U.S., Mexican and Canadian colleges and
universities gathered in May to build strong, lightweight, scale-model
bridges as the University of Utah hosted the 15th Annual National
Student Steel Bridge Competition. More than 400 universities with civil
engineering programs participated in regional competitions to qualify
for the national contest.
"It's an opportunity for them to carry out a civil engineering task from
inception to construction," says Pedro Romero, the competition's faculty
advisor and an assistant professor of civil engineering at the
University of Utah. "They learn teamwork, project scheduling, design,
construction – all skills they will need when they join the engineering
profession." The national contest is sponsored by the American Society
of Civil Engineers and the American Institute of Steel Construction.
Students were challenged to design and construct a scale-model steel
bridge approximately 20 feet long and 4 feet wide following instructions
that specify the bridge height, span length between supports, and the
size of each piece used to make the bridge. During the competition,
teams of five students were timed while they assembled their bridges.
Once assembled, each bridge was loaded with steel weights totaling 2,500
pounds, and judges measured how much the bridge deformed. Bridges scored
more points the faster they were assembled, the lighter their weight,
and the less they deformed under the 2,500-pound load. The bridge with
the most points won!
Find out more...
A
Bugs' Eye View
 Using
the eyes of insects such as dragonflies and houseflies as models, a team
of bioengineers at University of California, Berkeley, has created a
series of artificial compound eyes. These eyes can eventually be used as
cameras or sensory detectors to capture visual or chemical information
from a wider field of vision than previously possible, even with the
best fish-eye lens, said Luke P. Lee, the team's principal investigator.
Potential applications include surveillance; high-speed motion
detection; environmental sensing; medical procedures, such as
endoscopies and image-guided surgeries, that require cameras; and a
number of clinical treatments that can be controlled by implanted light
delivery devices.
"I've always wanted to
create an advanced, three-dimensional optical system," Lee said, "but
conventional microfabrication technology is two-dimensional. So, I
started thinking about basing a fabrication system on the developmental
stages of insect eyes that I'd learned about as a biophysicist and
bioengineer." What he and his team came up with is a low-cost,
easy-to-replicate method of creating pinhead-sized polymer resin domes
spiked with thousands of light-guiding channels, each topped with its
own lens. Not only are these units packed together in the same
hexagonal, honeycomb pattern as in an insect's compound eye, but each is
also remarkably similar in size, design, shape, and function to an
ommatidium, the individual sensory unit of a compound eye.
Just like pins in a pincushion - or a dragonfly's 30,000 ommatidia - the
team's artificial ommatidia are each oriented at a slightly different
angle. The lenses and waveguides of the artificial eyes focus and
conduct light in the same way as an insect's eye.
Find out more about careers
in bioengineering...
For
a Bigger Computer Hard-drive, Add H20
 Imagine
having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8
million gigabytes (GB) of information. Imagine an iPod playing music for
100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with
room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies. Now imagine if this could
be achieved by combining a computing principle that was popular in the
1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide.
Science fiction? Not exactly.
Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric
dipole moments. Until recently, it was a technological challenge to
stabilize ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. However Dr. Jonathan
Spanier from Drexel University and his research colleagues and the
University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new and slightly unusual
mechanism stabilizing the ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials:
surrounding the charged material with fragments of water. If
commercialized, ferroelectric memory of this sort could find its way
into home computers, rendering traditional hard-drives obsolete.
Find out more...
Career Cornerstone News is a publication of the
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