Undergraduate Education
We have designed our undergraduate educational
program with the goal of educating leaders who will have a deep understanding
of engineering fundamentals and are able to apply this knowledge to management
of complex systems with particular attention to the chemical process and
product industries. We believe that our students will be best served
by our program providing them with a foundation on which to build careers through
life-long learning and by teaching students how to learn. This foundation is thus
based on the key concepts of engineering while providing the students with the
training to rapidly apply their knowledge to solve problems and
develop relevant solutions.
Program Objectives and Outcomes
Our Program Educational Objectives are based on the concept that the educational experience in our Department should integrate the knowledge and skills acquired in a rigorous set of courses to enable the graduates of the program to:
- Apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering
- Graduates must demonstrate the ability to apply fundamental concepts gained from mathematics, physics, and chemistry courses to all Chemical Engineering courses.
- Graduates must also apply and successfully integrate previously learned fundamental concepts of chemical engineering, mathematics, and science courses to all subsequent courses, technical electives, and capstone courses such as Unit Operations and Senior Design.
- Design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data
- Graduates must demonstrate the ability to analyze engineering data to interpret trends, develop models, and evaluate their relevance.
- Graduates must also successfully identify the need for experiments, develop an experimental design, and analyze the data quantitatively.
- Design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints
- Graduates, when given objectives and constraints, must successfully
design a chemical system, process, product, or set of experiments
to achieve a specific economic, safety, and production goal.
- Graduates
must have the ability to design systems that are functional,
safe, efficient, and ethically sound
- Graduates must be able to identify
the limitations of any design. Graduates must demonstrate the
ability to evaluate and determine whether a design is adequate and should
be implemented.
- Function on multi-disciplinary teams
- Graduates must display proficiency in working in teams. Students must display the ability to divide work equitably, set individual and team goals, and complete work in a timely fashion.
- Graduates must be able to give and receive constructive criticism,
listen and incorporate others' ideas, neither dominate nor lack assertiveness within the team, and take initiative.
- Graduates must be able to identify their own strengths and weaknesses
and optimize the team structure to take advantage of everyone's strengths.
- Identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems
- Graduates, when presented any engineering problem, must be able to identify
all relevant information given, identify what information must
still be found, construct a diagram to visually set up the
problem (when appropriate), establish a plan for solving the
problem, solve the problem using previously learned knowledge or new knowledge
learned "just in time", and evaluate the solution for validity and relevance.
- Communicate effectively
- Graduates must demonstrate the ability to successfully describe engineering
projects or problems in both written and oral form to a variety of audiences:
management, fellow engineers, and lay persons.
- Graduates must be able
to effectively present data, persuade audiences, and
clearly and concisely answer questions.
- Have broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, and environmental societal context
- Graduates must have a strong understanding of the impact of their work.
Graduates must be able to recognize the implications of any project on
all persons involved: management, fellow engineers, all other workers,
local communities, and people affected on the state/national/global level.
- Students must translate this understanding to their design and decision
making process.
- Recognize the need for, and be able to engage in life-long learning
- Graduates must have automated the learning process to the degree that
self-learning and "just in time" learning are a natural part
of solving any engineering problem.
- Graduates must demonstrate
the ability to solve complex problems using a combination
of their fundamental engineering principles and self-taught knowledge
through research of the subject. Therefore, graduates should
feel confident in solving any problem (technical or non-technical.)
- Have knowledge of contemporary issues
- Graduates must be able to identify relevant issues affecting engineers
today and in the future.
- Graduates must identify their professional
role in these issues.
- Use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice.
- Graduates must be proficient in use of engineering equations, tables,
charts, published data, and simulation software such as Polymath, Matlab,
and Aspen to solve engineering problems.
- Graduates must display an understanding
of the appropriateness of all of these tools, i.e. identify
which tool should be used when and the limitations of each tool.
Our educational program is designed to serve the needs and aspirations of a broad set of stake holders (constituencies) including students and their families, faculty, companies who hire our graduates, graduate schools, corporate sponsors, the State of Illinois, the nation, and ultimately, the world population.
