SEAS considers more job-oriented classes

A generous-paying job offer can mark a happy finale to a Penn education, but at the Engineering school, making sure students are ready can be a difficult task.

With zealous recruiters, job-hungry students and a field changing faster than ever before, SEAS administrators and professors are now questioning how much weight to put on career-training in the school, one whose curriculum has long been rooted in teaching students fundamentals.

That means making decisions based on a myriad of factors, including how an economic recession may affect engineering jobs, which fields are booming and research that suggests Penn students may be inclined to enter the job market sooner rather than later.

According to data released by Career Services in October, nearly three-fourths of 2007 SEAS graduates were already employed full-time within months of leaving school. The ratio was higher than that of the College and matched or exceeded those of peer engineering institutions like MIT and Cornell.

As a result, employers have begun recruiting more aggressively in recent years, explained Rosette Pyne, Senior Associate Director at Career Services.

Pyne cited crowded career fairs now attracting freshmen and sophomores. She also pointed to attention-grabbing donations by companies like Accenture, which received naming privileges to the cyber cafe in Levine Hall.

Such measures have brought employers and students closer together, but officials at SEAS are hesitant to move the school's focus away from a foundational approach.

"It's always a challenge," SEAS Deputy Dean George Pappas explained. "On one side you want to give people the foundation they need, but at the same time you want to adapt to what society wants . [there is] no sort of optimum answer."

Luckily, he said, "The fundamentals do not change."

The careers available to engineers, however, have been changing. Consulting and financial services now account for 57 percent of the jobs taken by SEAS graduates upon leaving school, and schools are beginning to offer more classes that teach rapidly developing technology in fields like bioengineering and robotics.

"Engineering has become cross-disciplinary," explained Mark Savage, director of Co-op and Career Services at Cornell University. At Penn, many classes now combine topics in the Engineering School's six departments, and according to Pappas, the school has put added focus on undergraduate research and computer skills - things he said will help students in a career or in grad school.

Still, while Savage hinted that the changing dynamics of engineering may help it largely avoid the effects of an economic recession, he warned against putting too much emphasis on predictions about the future of the field. He pointed out to students at Cornell that predictions about technology in 50 years could be just as misguided as predictions in 1967 about today.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.