Engineering a New Future

The world is not like it was in years past. In fact, every day brings something new. Today is vastly different than yesterday. Many of these changes are brought on by advances in technology, which have a ripple effect throughout the marketplace and in our everyday lives.

These shifts, seismic in scale, are having an impact on what students want to learn and which degrees they wish to pursue in college. Our role as a university is to respond to that kind of demand and put forward an education that is relevant and helps our graduates be competitive in this ever-changing new world. Many well-known liberal arts universities have responded by establishing schools of engineering over the years, including Harvard, Dartmouth, William & Mary, Swarthmore, Bucknell and Smith.

To that end, this spring, the College of Charleston created two new academic schools to better focus our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) efforts: the School of Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics and the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences.

The School of Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics will be made up of the departments of engineering, computer science and mathematics. The needs of these disciplines in the applied sciences are aligned with one another and will benefit from their close organizational proximity within the new structure. This new framework will also make it easier for the school to seek out local, regional and statewide industry partners to engage them in faculty and student projects and internship opportunities. 

Since 2019, the College has introduced three new engineering degree programs – systems engineering, electrical engineering and computer engineering. These new programs were created with the help of our local industry partners. South Carolina’s workforce demands are far outpacing the number of graduates being produced in those fields, so the College of Charleston has an opportunity to not only help fill those gaps, but train and produce engineers with a liberal arts perspective, meaning they will have strong communication, critical thinking and cultural literacy skills than their peers coming out of similar programs at other universities. 

The School of Natural and Environmental Sciences will be composed of the departments of biology, chemistry and biochemistry; geology and environmental geosciences; and physics and astronomy. These disciplines put a premium on the life sciences and lab experience and position their students for placement in prestigious graduate programs and top-tier jobs. 

In my personal experience from a variety of public and private colleges, I believe that College of Charleston STEM majors are unlike science students at other universities. Our background in the liberal arts instills in them a much broader perspective and a wider range of understanding, making them more adaptable and flexible in our fast-changing world.   

Many colleges and universities do an excellent job of positioning their STEM students for their first job. We do that, too, of course, while we are also preparing our graduates to become leaders in their fields and careers. Engineers define acceleration as “the rate of change of velocity of an object with respect to time.”

At the College of Charleston, we believe that our liberal arts–trained STEM graduates in these two new schools possess an X factor that will help them to accelerate sooner, faster and longer, taking them to even greater heights.