Lauren RabainoWhile U.S. News & World Report named Cal Poly’s College of Engineering the nation’s top public, non-doctoral engineering school, its programs are intensive and not suitable for everyone. The liberal arts and engineering studies (LAES) program that started just this year aims to meet individual student interests and needs, and is so far meeting its expectations.
There are currently 15 full-time students in the program, which awards a bachelor of arts degree, and around five students are expected to enroll online in the next few weeks. All of the current students transferred from the College of Engineering.
LAES co-director David Gillette said that the program is intended to be small, and while there is no cut-off date for enrollment right now, the program will likely never top 100 students in order to keep it specialized.
“The program will probably be fairly popular in the future, but we want to work with students one on one,” he said.
The program is on a “trial run” for the next five years to see how it works, and changes and revisions may be implemented if the need arises, Gillette said.
“It’s like a start-up company; with a decent amount of time, resources and energy, it should be fine,” he said.
So far it’s working according to plan, with the expected initial enrollment met.
LAES was introduced as a hybrid program of engineering and technology study along with that of culture, arts and humanities. The program was meant to accommodate students whose interests didn’t lie solely in liberal arts or engineering.
“The program is for students who may not be doing so well because they lost interest in their major,” Gillette said. “This allows them the freedom to take more classes they’re interested in and focus on that.”
LAES also prevents engineering classes from being lost in the transfer to other disciplines such as business, where such courses aren’t useful. It appeals mostly to engineers as well as “tech-y artists.”
LAES sophomore Michael Robotham, who is looking for a career involving industrial design as well as the aesthetics of design, transferred to the program about a month ago from mechanical engineering.
“The thing that interested me the most was the fact that there is more freedom of design,” Robotham said. “In mechanical engineering, it is such a finite design process. In the LAES program, it is much more free.”
LAES came to fruition after two years of agreements with other departments.
“It rose completely from student interest, but we’ve wanted it for years,” Gillette said.
About three years ago, committees arose from the colleges of Liberal Arts and Engineering in order to facilitate the creation of LAES. The deans of both colleges were involved in the process, as well as new faculty members interested in teaching together who had come from programs with a more interdisciplinary focus than many at Cal Poly.
“There’s a bachelor of arts and engineering, bachelor of science in technology and arts. the names are different, but they’re all basically the same,” Gillette said. “It seems natural for such combinations to arise.”
The LAES degree is a full degree between two colleges rather than two departments – basically the first of its kind at Cal Poly.
Each of the current faculty members primarily teach in other departments except Gillette and co-director Lizabeth Thompson Schlemer, with whom he team-teaches the four core LAES courses.
Students cannot double-major in LAES and engineering or any other discipline, so students interested in majoring in LAES need to transfer to the program by applying separately. In order to transfer, students need only a “decent” grade point average as well as certain required courses in areas like math, chemistry, physics and English. And according to the College of Engineering Advising Center, once you transfer to LAES from the college, you cannot transfer back.
Students are a part of both the colleges of Liberal Arts and Engineering simultaneously, but their advisers are only those in the LAES program.
“LAES is a slightly different flavor, with a more international focus and access to higher-level liberal arts classes,” Gillette said.
LAES students follow a specialized track, either from one of five engineering concentrations or from one of four liberal arts concentrations, or an independent course of study they design along with LAES advisers.
The complexity of an LAES degree is so great that the program discourages admitting freshmen, who may not understand exactly what field they will want to study. Students are recommended to begin the program at the end of their sophomore year.
Students are required to choose a commercial or non-profit mentor in the field they wish to enter in order to help them move through their college career with specialized guidance, and work on a project of their choice.
“We want to throw them at projects and say, ‘You have to solve it,'” Gillette said.
One project, Intimate Transactions, is a collaborative effort with Australian architect Keith Armstrong that will be featured as an exhibit at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Intimate Transactions allows two people in separate places to experience a virtual reality interaction.
Using a concept called “Lumiére ghosting,” Intimate Transactions allows two people in separate rooms – or in this case, separate countries – to interact through a digital representation of themselves on a screen, which look like white ghosts. The figures on the screen move according to the movements of the user leaning against a structure connected to sensors.
The abstract project will run from June 7 to June 17 for two hours each day, and participants will be interacting with a partner in Beijing.
Organizations LAES students will be ready for include the Peace Corps, which values students interested in the environment but who also understand technology, and entertainment companies such as Disney, Warner Bros. and THX. The program also takes LAES students on field trips so they can experience certain industries.
To get a better idea of what career they want, LAES students must spend six months overseas for LAES 411 Collaborative Global Partnerships. The international focus is unique to the program.
A capstone senior project seminar is the final LAES course to take, during which students present their project at conferences and in front of committees and boards.
The core courses together are meant to help students determine exactly what they want to do.
“Students should be very articulate about who they are and what they’re doing,” Gillette said. “They should know where they’re going the day they leave (Cal Poly).”