With the next semester right around the corner, registering engineering students have diverse options of classes to take.
Graduate courses in the BYU Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering provide students opportunities to research and grow in their specific fields of interest. Some programs restructured their classes recently to make their course tracks more beneficial to students.
Here is a glimpse into a few of the classes you could be taking.
UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION - ME EN 577
This class will be offered in Winter 2025 and is taught by Dr. Douglas Cook. It focuses on measuring the variety engineers may face when producing a model.
Uncertainty Quantification takes undergraduate skills and interests and moves them toward a more graduate style of thinking.
Cook, a professor of mechanical engineering with research in crop mechanics, works with students to achieve efficiency.
“There's a range of possible outcomes,” Cook said. “We actually want to know what that range is so that we're not just spending a bunch of money building things much bigger than they need to be because we want them to be safe, but we don't want to spend any more than we have to, right?”
A student in the class will take their own model and put it through a series of tests to determine possible outcomes. They will participate in a risk analysis to see how good their model is, collecting “new knowledge about uncertainty” in their projects, Cook said.
This class may push some engineering students out of their comfort zones of thinking.
“We don't think about variation,” Cook said. “In fact, engineers deal with variation by trying to eliminate it.”
Cook finds value in this class’ capacity to get students to “develop their ability to think probabilistically” instead of deterministically.
One of Cook’s goals in teaching this class is to get students away from focusing on their number grade. He believes that Uncertainty Quantification can relate to academics as well.
“Sometimes you actually have confidence that you learn the material, but your score doesn't convey that, right? And sometimes, and I know it's happened to me, I’ve gotten a good score on an exam and I didn't deserve it, right? So, there's randomness there,” Cook said.
Grading in the class will be based on “human to human interaction,” Cook said.
For more information, students can contact Dr. Cook at d.cook@byu.edu.
CLIMATE AND AIR QUALITY IMPACTS OF TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS - CE 560
This class is being taken now during Fall Semester 2024 by a handful of graduate students and some seniors.
Dr. Darrell Sonntag recommended this class as one that he wanted to teach and has been teaching it since he came to BYU as a professor about two and a half years ago. Before working as an engineering professor, Sonntag worked in the Office of Air Quality and Transportation at the US EPA.
Graduate students in this class work on a research project of their choosing, similar to the following examples:
- actual compared to published coefficients of fuel economy
- how an engine is operating and how that affects its emissions
- life cycle analysis
- strategies to reduce projected greenhouse gas emissions in air travel after industry growth
- socioeconomic factors and car emissions
- impacts of corn ethanol production on water quality
“The scope of the project is pretty broad, but it's really anything that combines in the area of climate impacts, air quality impacts, and transportation,” Sonntag said. “They've all been really creative in what they've chosen.”
Sonntag follows the progression of their research throughout the semester and reviews their work.
During the semester, various guest speakers from different disciplines—law, corporate industries, government—come to teach students about how the things they are researching are applicable to what is going on in realtime in the world.
Sonntag describes CE 560 as “multidisciplinary” and “dynamic.”
“The material in this class could quickly become stale if I don't keep it up to date,” Sonntag said. “Policies are changing really quickly.”
Sonntag creates his own homework problems for the class that incorporate real world numbers, documents, and data. Teaching the class is rewarding and satisfying for him.
I think all students actually want to solve the big problems. They want to work the problems they hear about,” Sonntag said. “I think that's our job as professors to help them see a vision of how they can use their career to focus on those big challenges, which are bigger than just the discipline of our major.
Students can email Sonntag at darrell_sonntag@byu.edu with interest or questions about the class.
LEADERSHIP IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT - CFM 560
This class was born during the creation of a Construction Engineering Management Master’s degree when the Construction Facilities Management program moved from the School of Technology to merging with the Civil Engineering department.
New resources available through this adjustment allowed classes to form that are more research focused. Dr. James Smith created the class based on his research in trust and the interpersonal aspects of working on a construction job site.
Smith described the class as an introduction to a new kind of leadership that differs from traditional construction culture and transitions into a more effective way of leading.
“There's a heavy macho kind of culture and a heavy control sort of mentality,” Smith said. “This class is meant to hopefully help students see a different way of leading that would probably be shocking on most jobs, truthfully, but I think is the way of the future.”
In the class, Smith focuses on ethics and strategies used in effective councils through texts that are used.
Technical engineering skills can take students to various points in their career, but Smith proposes that at times it’s the “soft skills and the people skills that allow you to continue to progress.”
There are three main experiences in the class that are based on the first three steps of the traditional five steps of research: determining why something is a problem, what has already been done about it, and how students can contribute to solving the problem. Those main experiences are exploring ethics case studies, participating in a feedback loop in the form of a consulting gig, and a research component.
Smith is pleased with the research component of the class because it is prepared in a way that can be taken further with graduate students that are interested and excited.
Students in this class will work together to grow and provide feedback, even when it doesn’t come naturally. Smith said it’s not really about the content that students are learning but the application of that content.
The way that this class is valuable is if it's internalized, if it's introspective and self motivated, if you care to go now and try and do something different.
SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE - CCE 102
Civil Engineering has combined two classes in the program into this one class, Sustainable Infrastructure. This semester, Fall 2024, was the first semester that it was available.
The classes were combined in an effort to prepare civil engineering students with a well-rounded understanding of issues that civil engineers encounter as well as teach teamwork skills to be able to solve those issues.
In addition to being one of the first classes taken in the civil engineering program, Sustainable Infrastructure is a general education credit for Global and Cultural Awareness and an elective class in both the Global Environmental Studies minor and Civic Engagement minor.
Dr. Greg Macfarlane taught the class this semester and has been a part of crafting the course content. He recognized the importance of these topics within a civil engineering field.
“In civil engineering, we solve the biggest, hardest problems that we need to deal with,” Macfarlane said. “What kinds of strategies can we do to live on this planet sustainably?”
These topics were moved from 200 level classes to one 100 level class because faculty wanted students to be introduced to them first as they are entering the program, Macfarlane said.
“It’s leadership and teamwork in the context of saving the world from itself,” Macfarlane said. “We teach these leadership principles in the context of sustainability and sustainable infrastructure.”
As students begin the class, they are introduced to soft topics and a general understanding of sustainability projects and the impacts they may have. Then, the second half of the class focuses on a quantitative application of those projects and specific factors students would need to figure out to make an idea work.
Macfarlane said that the professors putting the class together have learned a lot and have high expectations for students. Helping the students rise to those expectations instead of lowering them when students fail has been important to their process, Macfarlane said.
At the heart of this class is the purpose to foster a care in students for the implications behind projects that they will be a part of in the future.
We do all these things to make human lives better, and when you forget that and just focus on the steel and the concrete, you kind of lose the point of life.
CCE 102 will be offered again in winter semester 2025. It will also be offered as a study abroad to Europe in spring term, where students and faculty will look at projects specifically in Western Europe. Macfarlane encourages anyone interested in participating in the study abroad to chat with him.