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Master of Nuclear Engineering Traineeship Program e

Paul J. Turinsky, Kuruvilla Verghese North Carolina State University

INTRODUCTION One of the recommendations that appears often from recent national discussions on reshaping graduate education in science and technologyl’2 is to provide joint industry-university projects as part of the students’ preparation. Many institutions are starting to do this particularly as a part of masters degree programs.

Since 1981, the NCSU Department of Nuclear Engineering has offered a masters degree that requires a combination of graduate course work and an engineering project of current interest to industry. The degree awarded is a Master of Nuclear Engineering (MNE). This differs from the Master of Science thesis work which is research oriented. Around 1983, an industry-funded MNE Traineeship Program was initiated to both provide financial support for the MNE graduate students and to enhance the relevance and quality of the engineering projects. The MNE Traineeship Program has been quite successful and is being continued at the rate of about three students per year.

This paper reports on the structure of the MNE Traineeship Program and an assessment of the benefits to the trainees, the sponsoring institution and the NCSU Department of Nuclear Engineering.

MNE DEGREE AND THE TRAINEESHIP PROGRAM STRUCTURE Normally an MNE graduate student will take a total of twenty four credit hours of course work, with nine of these credit hours required to be in courses constituting a minor. Additional six credit hours are associated with completion of an engineering project, summing to a total of thirty credit hours for the MNE degree. The course program for the MNE degree is somewhat more structured than for the MS degree. Also, admission to the MNE program requires an engineering baccalaureate degree while MS students often come from physical science disciplines. The engineering project required for the MNE can be either experimental or analysis based, in either case involving solution of a practical problem of current industrial interest. This is in contrast to the MS thesis which is based on original research. Upon completion of the engineering project, a written technical report is presented to the student’s graduate committee and it is defended in an oral examination. A total of 53 MNE degrees have been awarded so far.

Since its creation in 1983, the MNE Traineeship Program has been continuously supported by the nuclear power industry. More recently and to a lesser extent, the Department of Energy national laboratories

~hxti; 1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings ‘J311y’; .

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Turinsky, P. J., & Verghese, K. (1996, June), Master Of Nuclear Engineering Traineeship Program Paper presented at 1996 Annual Conference, Washington, District of Columbia. 10.18260/1-2--6179