The UGA Engineering (sic) Blues
by PV
Rumors have it that over yonder at the newfangled Dawg Engineering (sic) School of Athens, Georgia, they are going to be asking the Board of Regents to approve of two brand spanking new engineering degrees: a UGA Master of Science in Engineering (sic), and a UGA Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering (sic).
Now, of the multitude of “Gee, that’s interesting…” reactions some of you may have about this news, the most interesting observation PV has about this bit of news is these requested degree additions are not the result of some long-range, detailed plan of implementation. They are, instead, the result of very poor planning and complete ignorance, it seems, of what the reality is in the marketplace for hiring engineering professors.
From a publicly-available memo about an “email vote” from members of the Executive Committee of the UGA University Council that took place on June 9, 2011, we have the following statement: “…in attempting to hire new faculty for these [engineering] programs, there has been some difficulty in that the best faculty wish to serve at institutions with Ph.D. programs. UGA planned to add Ph.D.’s in these new engineering fields soon, so the process has been requested to be expedited.”
PV Ponders The Implications: So…the UGA Dawg Engineering (sic) administrative folks have found it challenging to recruit and hire good, qualified professors to come to Athens to teach undergraduate engineering (sic) courses, eh?
Because, just like the UGA grads in the Georgia Legislature who have a problem thinking much further down the road than their “lunch date” with the hot lobbyist (male or female), the always-only-thinking-as-far-as-his-navel-for-foresight-UGA-President-Michael Adams apparently just figured he could say to the world “Hey! We done got ourselves an Injuneering Skule here in Athens. Y’all come here and we’ll give you an injuneering degree,” and qualified instructors would just fall all over themselves to get a job at an institution that just basically offered a 4-year undergraduate degree in engineering (sic) and no research opportunities as there would be in any (real) school that offered graduate degrees in engineering?
And, upon PV’s reading of the two baffle-the-Board-of-Regents-with-Bullshit documents (which, granted, with at least 9 of the regents being UGA grads, that isn’t all that difficult to snow them with seemingly high-falutin’ language relating to engineering education concepts) that describe these two new degree programs, we discover that in order to get into either the UGA Master’s or UGA Doctorate in Engineering (sic) program(s), a student does NOT have to possess an undergraduate degree in engineering. One can merely possess a science or a mathematics undergraduate degree to get accepted into the UGA engineering (sic) graduate degree programs.
Wow. Awesome. Thanks for dumbing-down even more the concept of a quality engineering education from this state with not requiring undergraduate degrees in engineering as a prerequisite for getting into the UGA graduate program for engineering (sic).
All this new program crap means is that down the road, UGA will come running to the legislature for more money to support their lower-quality engineering (sic) curriculum because NO ONE is going to be rushing to get into the school when they discover that the major corporations who go to career fairs every single season at Georgia Tech will not be wasting their time visiting UGA to recruit Dawg Engineers (sic).
PV Offers This Bit of Advice To Anyone Contemplating Attending UGA Engineering (sic) Skule: If you want to be an engineer, and you cannot get into Georgia Tech, go to Auburn for your engineering education. The women are just as good-looking as those that go to UGA, but you’ll get a much better…real engineering education than you could ever possibly get with the yahoo-run Dawg Engineering (sic) Skule.
