(College Station)—The sky's the limit for some student
engineers at Texas A&M University. Building
and launching real satellites, designing high-altitude imaging probes and
interning at NASA's Johnson
Space Center are just some of the projects the 61 students in Texas
A&M Engineering's Space Engineering
Institute (SEI) are involved in this year.
"We want to show these students, through actual hands-on involvement in
real projects, what engineers—and especially space engineers—do," said
Jan Rinehart, deputy director of Texas A&M's Spacecraft Technology Center
and coordinator of the center's Space Engineering Institute. SEI is an academic
program conducted by the Texas
Engineering Experiment Station's (TEES) Spacecraft
Technology Center.
Rinehart said the SEI program aims to provide practical training and hands-on
experience that strongly encourages students to pursue engineering degrees
leading to careers in space systems; provide real world projects and experiences
that support the engineering curriculum; and specifically encourage women
and ethnic minorities to careers in space engineering.
Unlike many "hands-on" experiences in engineering school, SEI
students start getting their hands dirty as freshmen. The program also
offers opportunities to intern with space engineers at NASA's Johnson Space
Center in Houston.
"The opportunity to intern at JSC is an important part of what makes SEI
attractive," Rinehart said. "But it also gives our students a chance
to see engineering from the inside and see it from the beginning of their academic
careers."
The students' involvement in real projects is an important part of the
SEI program, Rinehart said. Working with projects that involve real engineering
tasks is critical to understanding what engineers do in real life and that
affects whether students stay in engineering.
"We've talked to students who dropped out of the engineering program,
and many of them had no idea—even after being in class for a semester
or two—how they will use what they're learning in class," she said.
The SEI program began at Texas A&M's College Station campus in 2002
and will be expanded to other campuses in the A&M System beginning
in the fall. Rinehart began a similar program at Prairie View A&M University
and will begin similar programs at A&M-Commerce and probably at A&M-Kingsville
in 2006. Plans are underway to work with other engineering educators at
Texas universities in the future.
One aspect of SEI that is especially important to students, said Rinehart,
is its system of mentoring. Under this approach, teams of first- and second-year
students have mentors who are third- and fourth-year students. The third-
and fourth-year students' mentors are engineering graduate students. Members
of the faculty mentor and full-time engineers at STC and JSC mentor the
graduate students, in turn.
It's very effective, Rinehart said.
"First-year students need to learn from students who have already gone
through the course what it means to be in college," she said. "Sometimes
it's good just to have someone there to tell them what this or that means."
The program must be doing something right—a team of SEI students
placed first in their division of a university-wide research poster competition. 