Goals
- Attract and Retain High quality and diverse graduate student population
- Increase the number of our graduates in leadership positions in academia, industry and national laboratories.
Benchmark 5: Enrollment
Metric: Graduate enrollment/total enrollment.Target: 25% of total MME student population.
Impact: Increased emphasis on graduate education to bring us closer to our peers.
Metric: PhD enrollment/grad enrollment
Target: PhD students 50% of grad students
Impact: Doctoral students in our graduate programs are important to nurture scholarship, and enhance the quality of the program and the experience of the students.
Benchmark 6: Student quality
Metric: GPA scores of incoming students
Target: Peer average
Impact: This will ensure that we have graduate
students who can produce top quality research work and can be
competitive in the market place.
Metric: Percent of graduating students placed on
academic positions, or postdoctoral positions, or leadership positions
in industry or government
Target: 30%
Impact: Placing our graduates in significant positions is a measure of the quality of the program.
Metric: Number of peer-reviewed publications per student based on their graduate work
Target: One per M.S. student and three per Ph.D. student
Impact: Publication of research work stimulates
critical thinking, develops appreciation for scholarly work, provides a
sense of accomplishment, and elevates the quality of the graduate
experience.
Metric: Number of oral presentations of research work per student.
Target: One internal or regional presentation per M.S.
student and one internal/regional and one national presentation per
Ph.D. student
Impact: Oral presentation of research work provides
opportunity for significant improvement of communication skills and
allows students to begin developing a professional network.
Strategies
- Restructure MS and Ph.D. programs to meet needs of emerging technologies and new research areas (e.g. offer graduate Certificates) (See Appendix C).
- Prepare Ph.D. students for academic careers by training at least 2 Ph.D. students per year through the MME Teaching Fellow program.
- Expose students to recent developments and innovations for a broad base education by working towards having all graduate students (at least once) attend and present papers at conferences and symposia (local, national or international).
- Expose students to National Laboratories experience by nominating them to laboratory sponsored Fellowships.
- MME Symposium series: Organize one symposium per academic semester with one speaker every week (50% of the speakers should be external).
- Awards: Nominate students to internal and external awards (Awards Committee).