Implementing the Master's for Engineering Professionals degree at NJIT

This paper reports on a plan for implementing a Master's for Engineering Professionals at New Jersey Institute of Technology. The Master's for Engineering Professionals is intended for the early career development of engineers in industry. It teaches the skill sets and abilities required of these engineers. Skills include a working knowledge of business and ethics, teamwork experience, a solid grounding in engineering science as well as communication and presentation skills. The program develops abilities such as an appreciation of the basic principles of business, the profit motive, how to design and execute experiments, how to prepare project plans and regulatory documents, and how to carry out a real-life project within a company. Program emphasis is placed upon engineering creativity and innovation. with a strong emphasis on the needs of the nation to compete in the world market and maintain the strength of the U.S. economy. A second objective of the paper is to describe the current status of a recently developed Professional Science Master's (PSM) after which this program is modeled. For the past ten years the PSM program has been growing in popularity in US schools of engineering. It is designed for students who do not wish to continue on to a doctorate leading to an academic career but rather to enter the workforce with a master's degree, a degree now viewed by many as having displaced the baccalaureate as the terminal engineering degree. These programs put more emphasis on applied skills as opposed to those more theoretical in nature. The paper concludes with a detailed description of the NJIT proposed curriculum and the assessment process used to evaluate defined outcomes.