Asee peer logo

The Doctor of Engineering as a New Degree for a New Category of Students: Full-Time, Non-Residential, High-Touch, Research-Focused, Mentored, Professional

Download Paper |

Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Non-Traditional Doctoral Programs

Tagged Division

Graduate Studies

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/1-2--33382

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/33382

Download Count

822

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Edward R. Scheinerman Johns Hopkins University

visit author page

Ed Scheinerman is the Vice Dean for Graduate Education in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He is a professor in the department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His undergraduate studies were at Brown University and his doctorate is from Princeton (both in Mathematics). He is the author of textbooks, a research monograph, and most recently a general-readership book entitled "The Mathematics Lover's Companion". His teaching and writing have been recognized with various awards including the Lester R. Ford Award from the Mathematical Association of America (two-time recipient).

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

The doctoral degree is the pinnacle of higher education. Students are deeply immersed in research conducted under the mentorship of expert professors. These students are typically young (not yet settled into careers) and reside on campus for years. They begin full of promise, but need to augment their undergraduate training to become effective researchers. And while engineering Ph.D. graduates go on to a wide variety of professions, the Ph.D. degree is designed to train scholars.

There is, however, an entirely different demographic of students who want a research-based doctoral education, but are already settled in their careers. Perhaps they have families and are paying a mortgage. They cannot possibly excuse themselves from a nice job to live on a grad student’s stipend and relocate to another city.

With these students in mind, the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins has launched an innovative Doctor of Engineering (D.Eng.) program designed to run in parallel to our traditional Ph.D. program. We have created a doctoral program with the following characteristics: • It is based on a research partnership between the student’s current employer and the JHU School of Engineering: students collaborate with JHU Engineering faculty on difficult problems that are of importance to their employers. • It is non-residential: Students pursue their doctoral studies at their workplace. As needed, they may take courses from our extensive online offerings. • It is full-time: Because of the importance of the research to their employers, students work on their projects during the “day time” as central to their work duties. • It is designed for engineering professionals, not future academics: One manifestation of this is that the students, rather than producing a book-length manuscript (i.e., a dissertation), instead defend a final portfolio that includes evidence such as invention disclosures, computer simulations, working prototypes, journal submissions, and so forth. Our goal is to imbue mature students with the research depth they need to be creative engineers while simultaneously forging research collaborations with various companies and agencies.

Scheinerman, E. R. (2019, June), The Doctor of Engineering as a New Degree for a New Category of Students: Full-Time, Non-Residential, High-Touch, Research-Focused, Mentored, Professional Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--33382

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2019 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015