History of the Undergraduate Core Curriculum
Since the 1970s, Thayer School's undergraduate curriculum has enjoyed remarkable consistency, maintaining a basic philosophy and fundamental core despite drastic changes taking place in the engineering world. New fields open up as scientific disciplines converge, and new discoveries push the boundaries of knowledge. Even so, Thayer School has not fallen behind in training engineers to enter the "real" world. The School's program remains successful because it is based on an educational philosophy at once so radical that in more than 40 years it has not yet been imitated and so elastic that it has needed very few changes to maintain its relevance to the field.
To tell the full story of this philosophy and the curriculum it inspired requires reaching back to the late 1950s. Until then, Thayer School was an old-fashioned engineering school. Its original focus, civil engineering, had been broadened to include mechanical and electrical engineering, but, basically, students were still learning the things that engineers had always learned.
By the 1950s, outside the School, the field of engineering had greatly changed. Engineering research, accelerated by the technological demands of World War II, had diverged into new fields for which a traditionally trained engineer was not necessarily prepared. Knowledge of surveying was no help when all of the opportunities lay in nuclear power and the growing space program. Engineering was edging away from a practiced art toward an investigative science. If Thayer School wanted to keep up with the outside world, then change was in order.
A Constructive Whirlwind
Two deans are credited with bringing Thayer School into the modern era. Dean William P. Kimball (1945-1961) was the first to recognize the convergence of mathematics, science, and engineering. Working with committees from both Dartmouth College and Thayer School, he created the undergraduate engineering sciences department within the College and staffed it with Thayer School faculty. This department brought the engineering school into a close relationship with the mathematics and science departments within the College. Dean Kimball ensured that further change would come to Thayer School when he recommended as his successor Myron Tribus, whose revolutionary ideas about engineering education would garner a Sloan Foundation grant to implement them. Dean Tribus came to Thayer School with ideas that were both radical and exciting to the faculty. Even in 2005, the changes that were begun in 1961 were still admiringly called "the Tribus revolution" by many faculty members, with Tribus himself described in the highest terms.
Dean Myron Tribus teaching in 1968.
Not to Make an Expert at Once
Like Dean Kimball, Dean Tribus saw engineering as an increasingly interdisciplinary field. But Tribus saw further. He believed that all engineering grew from the same basic and overarching mathematical principles and that the fullest understanding of engineering came from studying these principles in their universal, rather than particular, applications. Instead of encouraging Thayer School to build a program based on individual disciplines, he proposed turning the School into an interdisciplinary institution, with the engineering sciences forming the basis of an integrated core. Instead of graduating mechanical engineers, civil engineers, and electrical engineers, Thayer School would graduate engineers—that is, students trained in the relevant sciences and mathematics to solve problems regardless of where they led. At that time, no other school would have dreamed of doing this. Nor would any other school have taken Tribus's steps to bring it about.
The first and most radical step was to eliminate the separate civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering degree programs and create a new curriculum. All Thayer School undergraduates would complete this core curriculum to master the principles that underlay all further study. They would follow its completion with electives designed to provide a background in specific fields of their own choosing. Universals, then particulars; breadth, then depth.
This core curriculum consisted of one physics course; two "systems" courses, which taught the overarching principles; and three engineering sciences courses, which introduced fundamental material. This core has proved to be remarkably resilient. Although it was redesigned in 2002, the original model persisted for more than 30 years, and the guiding principle of "breadth, then depth" remained fundamental to the Thayer School philosophy.
In a way, this persistence is not surprising. The seeds of an interdisciplinary core may well have been sown at the beginning of Thayer School's history. The 1874-1875 Dartmouth catalogue described Thayer School's program as:
furnishing thorough and systematic instruction in all the fundamental principles and operations pertaining to the science; not to make an 'expert' at once, in any branch or branches of the profession, but to give the capable student that preparation which shall enable him to become such by subsequent application.
Though Tribus's ideas were revolutionary in content, they were perfectly in tune with the spirit of Thayer School—and the arrival of this combination at the beginning of a new era in engineering could not have been more perfectly timed.
Preceded by courses in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the courses Tribus selected for the core were of two types: interdisciplinary systems courses teaching his own theory of unified principles, and subject courses introducing the most important areas of engineering study.
The Systems Core
At traditional engineering schools, students are taught to model the systems they can expect to see in their fields: mechanical engineers study mechanical systems, electrical engineers study electrical systems. After studying systems in one field, the student would not be expected to understand systems in another. Tribus urged his faculty to sail above such compartmentalization. The big idea behind the systems core was that the same equations have the same solutions. Once students have the mathematical model that describes one of these systems, once they can solve that equation, then they can analyze all the other kinds of systems, too, because they all produce the same kind of equations.
The original systems core comprised two courses, each presenting a different mathematical unity. ENGS 22: Elementary Statics and Dynamics covered central forces, rigid body theory, and lumped parameter systems, all described by ordinary differential equations. ENGS 50: Distributed Systems and Fields, developed and taught by Professor Bengt Sonnerup, covered systems modeled with the use of partial differential equations. No textbooks were available for such courses, so the professors who taught them spent evenings and late nights developing notes, lab assignments, and, most important, applications from many fields.
Both these systems courses went through many revisions during the 1960s and 1970s, with their titles and syllabi changed as the faculty mastered the new approach. For more than a decade, ENGS 22 split into two courses: Systems I, which was focused on mechanical and electrical systems, and Systems II, a continuation of Systems I with an emphasis on electromechanical and other systems. Systems II was eventually dropped during the 1980s, but the other two systems courses continued to develop as new faculty took up the challenge of teaching unified systems.
In 2002, a concerted curriculum review raised the concern that even two systems courses could not contain all the possible instances and applications of unified systems theory. Just as Kimball had found in the 1950s, engineering was again broadening and diversifying. Professor Eric Hansen collaborated with Professors Linda Wilson and Ulf Österberg on the development of a third systems course, ENGS 27 Discrete and Probabilistic Systems. The mathematical unity was probability theory with the focus on independent, random actors, such as lines at an airline terminal or a grocery counter. The first two systems courses were also examined and their applications broadened to encompass new engineering fields such as biotechnology and environmental engineering.
Today, the systems core remains the essential study for every student majoring in engineering sciences, considered by the unanimous faculty as fundamental to an engineering education.
ENGS 21
Also essential to the core was a course with the unprepossessing title of ENGS 21: Introduction to Engineering, which Dean Kimball introduced in 1958 as a theoretical foundation for students embarking on engineering studies. Later, under Tribus, Robert Dean Jr. retooled the course to provide a very different foundation—an introduction to engineering design:
Engineering is developed as a synthesis of many fields combining physical theory, mathematics, economics, graphics, and elements of management. A realistic engineering problem is developed, from an initial concept, until a suitable evaluation of its potentiality can be established. Lectures and laboratory are directed towards the problem under study, with experiments devised by the students as the need arises. (Thayer School Bulletin, 1964-1965)
Students devising experiments? Lectures directed toward a specific problem? Once again, Thayer School was leading a revolution. Traditional laboratory exercises required students to follow rote procedures to predictable results. Under Tribus, many courses already were offering labs that were more interdisciplinary and more experimental in nature than were the traditional labs. ENGS 21 combined the investigative, practical elements of the laboratory with the creative elements of design. The course also gave sophomore engineering students an unprecedented opportunity to experience "real" engineering as it was practiced in the world of industry. At most engineering schools, such an opportunity would not come until the final year of study.
Besides this unprecedented adventure in design, ENGS 21 provided students with something that some engineers never learn even in graduate school—a systematic approach to problem solving. George Taylor had developed such an approach for ENGG 172: Methods Engineering. Professor Dean, along with Paul Shannon, transformed it for beginning engineers. This Thayer School signature problem-solving cycle, an iterative set of steps by which the problem at the heart of a presented need is defined, asks students to brainstorm possible solutions, identify specifications for a solution, determine the best of possible solutions with the use of a matrix of ideas and specifications, and then test the chosen solution against the original problem. The cycle can be repeated as often as needed, and it reliably produces a solution that is effective not only in theory but also in application. The value of the cycle extends far beyond engineering. Not every student in ENGS 21 goes on to become an engineer, yet even non-engineers have found the iterative cycle useful in solving problems encountered in other fields, including nonscientific ones. When the course was first taught in 1961, the whole class attacked the same problem—building an electric bicycle—with each small group competing against the others. Guest lecturers discussed the problem in detail. But with a narrowly defined problem, only a certain number of students might be interested in electrifying a bicycle. Within a few years, ENGS 21 professors—including Russell Stearns, Carl Long, Thomas Laaspere, and Graham Wallis—were presenting students with more general themes, such as underwater exploration (an analog to space travel) or fire protection and prevention.
Aya Kamaya '95 showing her ENGS 21 team's prototype for skating on dirt trails.
In 1984, John Collier '72 Th'77, who had taken ENGS 21 as an undergraduate, began teaching the course. Professor Collier noted that in the 15 years between his taking it as a student and his teaching it, the course remained about the same thing: "find a problem, solve a problem." Fresh from a stint of teaching ENGG 196: Design Methodology, a project-based B.E. course, Collier wondered whether other elements of the more advanced course could be brought into ENGS 21—for example, developing a business plan and projecting the success or failure of an entrepreneurial venture, which was an "extremely helpful" exercise for training students to think about both practicality and possibility.
Professor John Collier on an ENGS 21 review board.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Collier, along with Ian Baker and William Lotko, introduced other changes to help ENGS 21 do even better what it already did well—provide a real "introduction to engineering." In the words of Myron Tribus, ENGS 21 exists so that students can "experience the hands-on fun of actually doing something creative and useful before undertaking the abstract theoretical courses required for advanced practice."
The Rest of the Core
The theoretical work was to begin with the rest of the core, from which students got their grounding in engineering sciences. After the systems core, the faculty required three additional courses: ENGS 51: Solid Mechanics, ENGS 61: Introduction to Thermostatics and Thermodynamics, and ENGS 63: Science of Materials. These courses were meant to provide variety yet remain relevant to students' further elective study. For many years they anchored Thayer School's program, but by the 1980s their central role had come into question. Yet the rapidly growing faculty included an increasing number of professors and researchers whose specialties were in such relatively new fields as biotechnology, chemical engineering, and computer engineering, among others.
Encouraged by Dean Charles Hutchinson, the faculty of Thayer School began a process of curriculum discussion, review, and redesign that would take more than a decade to complete. The big question was: Engineering is changing, so what is the engineering of the future? Everyone agreed that the principle of "breadth, then depth" remained essential. Deciding which courses were fundamental and which could be made optional was a greater challenge. Few students would volunteer for a 20-course major, and it is also doubtful whether introducing students to so many different fields—mechanical, chemical and biochemical, electrical, computer, and so on—would adequately prepare them for graduate or professional work in any one of them. Decisions had to be made.
The eventual conclusion was a compromise between the Tribus ideal and the growing demands of the field. Instead of a single, uniform program, the new core consists of three tiers, to ensure a measure of breadth while allowing students to explore their interests sooner than possible under the previous core.
The first tier is the common core, or the "core of the core." Common core courses included ENGS 21: Introduction to Engineering, which introduces students to engineering design and product development, and the traditional systems core, ENGS 22: Systems and ENGS 23: Distributed Systems and Fields. The second tier, the distributive core, consists of four courses, from which students choose two. Tribus's standards, ENGS 24: Science of Materials and ENGS 25: Introduction to Thermodynamics, are here, along with ENGS 26: Control Theory and ENGS 27: Discrete and Probabilistic Systems. The major is rounded out by the third tier, consisting of two courses selected from among introductory courses in chemical, biochemical, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineering. According to their interests, students elect one course from each of two areas. This requirement ensured breadth even as it shaped the beginnings of later study.
This three-tier core pleases some people more than others. Students appreciate the flexibility, while some faculty members are uncertain that branching out so early in the course of study is useful. Time will tell whether the new system has the staying power of Tribus's core. Faculty teaching the core courses do not doubt that further changes will come as the field of engineering evolves. But Thayer School does not worry. One of the School's great strengths—one that has served it well throughout its history—is that it is small enough to be maneuverable, small enough to be transformed in each new era.
—by Annelise Hansen '08, excerpted from Knowledge with Know-How: Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, published by the University Press of New England, 2007.