Academics
At
UC Davis our programs continue to serve as
- a sound basis for beginning and maintaining professional practice in engineering. Fundamental principles are emphasized. Since no engineer can be sure what direction his/her own career may take, this emphasis will give maximum professional flexibility.
- a general preparation for careers in corporate or governmental operations, such as planning, analysis, sales, and management.
- a general foundation for pursuing graduate study or other kinds of continuing education, according to the individual's needs.
Over the years, we have achieved a great deal of success in meeting these multiple objectives. A study of nearly 1,500 engineering graduates from the University of California has shown that (1) 90 percent of the survey respondents felt their technical educations were important to their careers; (2) they had gone into a wide spectrum of activities. About 50 percent went into design, research, and development, but nearly 40 percent went into such activities as operations, planning, technical sales, and management, in which their technical backgrounds were important to their career success.
Through the last decades, engineering professionals and scholars, particularly at research universities like UC Davis, have developed both theoretical knowledge and applications of knowledge to improve the human condition. If you become an engineering student here, learning both to further develop this knowledge and to apply it to the technological problems raised in the twenty-first century will be your task.
Computers, communications satellites, chemical plants, hypersonic aircraft, super conducting materials, and fiber optics would be impossible to produce without theoretical knowledge.
Yet beginning engineering students sometimes have trouble seeing how the theory they learn will be of value to them. If engineers were only to follow the tracks laid down by others, perhaps all engineering knowledge would be reducible to practical methods courses. But engineers are constantly being faced with new challenges, and without sound mathematical and scientific backgrounds you will not be able to meet those challenges. The escalating pace of technological development in recent years has made it clear that your engineering education must be based upon fundamentals or it will be in danger of rapid obsolescence.
Professors must do research to keep expanding the theoretical base of engineering knowledge. Some members of society ask, "Why do professors do any research at all? Why don't they just teach?" We believe that professors are better teachers if they are themselves continually involved in research, than if they teach only from what others have learned. Researchers are more involved in extending the technological frontier; hence, they teach more up-to-date courses and understand where the new problems are emerging. This research is an essential part of the mission of the University of California. A direct consequence of our faculty's research activity is that your education also will be up-to-date. Because of the rapid pace of change in technology, all engineers must be committed to a lifetime of learning if they are to remain knowledgeable throughout their careers, and, as an engineer educated in a research university, you will have the ability to do so.
Engineers face new challenges from our evolving society, with its continuing demand for improvement in the quality of life. Technological improvement leads to economic growth. The social and economic advantages of advancing technology have led many nations to develop very high levels of technological capabilities, and they now compete with the United States in worldwide markets. From an international perspective, such competition is healthy, but the future success of our country in this milieu - indeed, the preservation of our quality of life requires your generation of engineers to have the ability to innovate, to meet new challenges and to operate in a global market. We therefore encourage our students to study or intern abroad. As graduates of a land-grant institution, you will be expected to use your engineering education to help maintain US technological leadership while improving technology for the benefit of all.