16 September 2008
University of Illinois Offers More than Top Engineering Program
Great cultural experience awaits international students, says director
This is the sixth story in a series on top-ranked programs in higher education.
Washington — The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign is one of the world’s largest and most prestigious engineering institutions, with a long history of innovation and excellence. The college’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering sits perennially atop the rankings of undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.
“Our program has been consistently ranked high over many, many years by U.S. News and World Report,” said Albert Valocchi, the associate head and director of graduate studies for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The annual USNWR magazine rankings are closely followed by students, parents, educators and institutions as one of the few independent indicators of program quality, although such rankings are not without their critics.
The ancient field of civil engineering, which takes its name in contradistinction to military engineering, deals with the design, construction and maintenance of bridges, roads, canals, dams and buildings. Civil engineers built the pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Roman aqueducts, the Suez Canal and — in modern times, with help from more specialized engineers — the world’s skyscrapers.
“One of the things that’s unique about our program is that we have a large department — comprehensive; we cover all the major sub-disciplines of civil and environmental engineering and we have really good programs in all areas, we have strength in all areas,” Valocchi said.
Ghadir Haikal, a doctoral candidate from Syria, agreed. “I have had access to world-class research and teaching in various disciplines,” she said. “I have deeply enjoyed taking classes taught by very distinguished faculty and participating in cutting-edge scientific research. The breadth of expertise among the faculty and the quality of the research facilities make for a very dynamic and productive academic environment.”
The most important aspect of the Illinois experience may have to do with the fact that international students, like Haikal, comprise almost one-third of those in the master’s program and three-quarters of those in the doctoral program.
“There’s the academic side where they get to work with a famous professor on some cutting-edge project. But I think there’s a great cultural experience here,” said Valocchi. “They get to interact with domestic students and lots of other international students from other countries. Usually there’s some kind of interaction in the classroom or on their projects where they’d be having group meetings working in teams. I think that’s really important — the cultural experience.”
“I was surprised how friendly my classmates were towards helping each other to do well in classes and research,” said Susana Kimura, a doctoral candidate from Mexico. “Even though professors are extremely busy, they welcome students to talk. The cooperative and sharing atmosphere in the program helps students succeed in the program and in their research,” she added in an e-mail interview.
Haikal agreed. “I have greatly benefited from being involved in teaching and extracurricular activities, in addition to various challenging research projects,” she said. “These experiences have had a key influence on my professional and personal development.”
Kimura also singled out the benefit she derived from mentoring and interacting with high school students and teachers in extracurricular activities related to her environmental engineering work in the area of water chemistry.
FOCUS ON INFRASTRUCTURE
The Civil Engineering Department added “Environmental” to its name in the 1990s, Valocchi said, because the “field sort of broadened out and got beyond just treatment of human waste and providing safe drinking water, but also expanded into environmental impacts of contamination on streams and rivers and oceans, and even emissions of air contaminants.” There always has been a connection in civil engineering between foundations, buildings, and roads with infrastructure for water and wastewater, he said.
“In the environmental engineering area there’s a lot of overlap with people who are doing molecular biology. Our faculty and students work with tools from genomics and DNA analysis. These are the kinds of things you might not normally associate with environmental engineering,” Valocchi explained.
“Our civil engineering focus is on infrastructure, and there’s a direct connection to public welfare and social benefit, and so as a result we get a lot of students from developing countries that come here,” Valocchi said.
“We have very excellent research facilities. We have a very large amount of externally funded research that goes on in our department. So there are a lot of research opportunities. I think also we benefit from being in the entire College of Engineering — there are many other excellent departments. We benefit from the excellence that’s around us in other departments so that we can collaborate with them in the College of Engineering and even elsewhere on our campus,” he said.
In fact, research in the college as a whole has drawn more than $167 million in funding for more than 1,900 projects by some 650 researchers and thousands of graduate and undergraduate students.
USNWR also ranks as Number 1 the college’s undergraduate programs in materials engineering and agricultural engineering, as well as its graduate engineering program in condensed matter physics. Most of the college’s other programs are ranked in the top 10 nationally. The Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2007 judged Illinois Number 3 in the world for engineering/technology and computer sciences.
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois is large, with 546 undergraduate students and 362 graduate students. But then, with 5,600 undergraduates, more than 2,500 graduate students and 12 departments, so is the College of Engineering. Of the civil engineering graduate students, 168 are enrolled in the master’s program and 194 in the doctoral program. About one-quarter of the students at both the master’s and doctoral levels are female.
Since Imhotep engineered the pyramid at Saqqara, skilled practitioners of civil engineering have been in demand. Today, Valocchi said, the job market for civil engineers in the United States is so hot that “it’s extremely hard to convince a domestic student to stay for a Ph.D.” after getting the master’s degree.
