Students Jude Nwoko (2005 BSEE), Jennifer Benoit and Adewale Adeniji-Adele access coursework in the new Engineering Educational Resource Center.

Prompted in part by a growing national concern of impending labor shortages in science and engineering, the UH Cullen College of Engineering has added a wealth of new programs and services, all designed to enhance the undergraduate student experience and improve each student’s chances of successfully completing the curriculum and becoming outstanding young engineers.

“Colleges of engineering have to continue to improve and come up with ways to retain students once they decide they want to be engineering majors because successfully educating future engineers is critical if you’re going to have a stable, technology-driven workforce,” says Frank “Fritz” Claydon, associate dean for undergraduate programs and computer facilities for the college.

UH is one of the most diverse universities in the U.S. with many first-generation college students or first in their families to pursue an engineering degree.

Several programs help students succeed, but the first was the Program for Mastery in Engineering Studies (PROMES). Founded in 1973 by professor Gerhard Paskusz, PROMES offers a model for group learning techniques, workshops and other student support functions now being implemented on a broader scale across the college. Some of these new initiatives recently received more than three million dollars in funding from state and national sources.

The college has added a new director of undergraduate student recruitment and retention, Julie Trenor, who also teaches introductory courses to freshmen engineering students. The college has also launched a new Engineering Career Center, improved the Industrial Scholar Interns Program, added an Engineering Leadership and Entrepreneurism Program, expanded the emphasis on technical communications throughout the curriculum and nearly doubled the number of computers available to students.

“This is something the dean has wanted for a long time,” Claydon says, “we now have a director of recruiting who has a Ph.D. in engineering. That’s very important because Julie is able to effectively communicate to parents and to students the expectations and demands of an engineering curriculum.”

The undergraduate population today is approximately 1,800 students, a number Dean Raymond Flumerfelt has said he is happy with. So the recruiting effort is focused on doing a better job recruiting more “high ability” students, meaning students with high SAT scores and high school class rank.

“What we’re trying to do is target kids who have high SAT scores,” says Claydon. “UH can offer very nice scholarship support, relative to our competitors.”

The added push for more technical communications in the curriculum will help UH engineering graduates become more effective professionals once they enter the workforce, and the addition of Chad Wilson, a new director of technical communication instruction, who has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UH, has brought new focus and leadership to that effort.

“Our Technical Communications course, ENGI 2304, is now an approved part of the university core curriculum,” says Claydon. “The idea is that the technical communications course is intended to be the backbone, if you will, for future efforts by faculty and students in junior level and senior level courses. The idea is to start with the backbone of the ENGI 2304 and then each degree program develops a thread of courses in which they continue to develop technical communications for students at the junior and senior level.”

Last October, the Engineering Computing Center (ECC) opened a new 32-station PC laboratory within the ECC complex. The computers in this laboratory can operate both in the Windows XP and LINUX environment, as the user sees fit. The costs associated with this laboratory were funded in part with Undergraduate Equipment Access Fees and College of Engineering Technology Fees.

In April, the college opened a new 28-seat facility, dedicated for faculty and student instruction as well as training, which is located in the Engineering Educational Resource Center.

“What that’s going to mean,” explains Claydon, “is that when a faculty member wants to bring students to the computer lab for direct instruction during class time, all of those activities will go to our new facility instead of occupying some of the primary ECC complex. The existing ECC will always be open to students for general use. And that’s a net increase of 60 seats in the last seven months.”

The third improvement on behalf of the students is in the hiring of a full-time lab manager, Bobby DeWees, and the implementation of a new printing system in the computer labs.

“Uniprint provides the cure to printing in volume for students as well as eliminating waste in the lab,” says Claydon. Under the new system, the student releases a job from his or her computer and then goes to a separate print station where they swipe their Cougar 1Card. Only then does the printer process the job, which means the student is the only one that can print the job. In addition, if a student doesn’t print his or her job in four hours, the job gets flushed from the queue, and that’s eliminating a lot of the waste, according to Claydon. “On average, we cut waste by about 90 percent.”