College of Engineering and Computing Overview

Thank you very much for joining me today for a quick overview of the College of Engineering and Computing. I'm Clark Kelly. I'm one of the Assistant Dean's here at Miami University's College of Engineering and Computing. And behalf of our Dean, Beena Sukumaran, I would like to welcome you to this virtual presentation. We know that our students that apply and come here to Miami University have a huge amount of imagination and ingenuity. And by getting a technical technical degree from the College of Engineering and Computing, they will be able to have an impact on their community on their society, which is why our tagline is ICubed, imagination, ingenuity and impact. So here's the topics I'm going to go over today. And at the end, those of you who are here live with me on the virtual presentation, we'll be able to do a little bit of questions and answers. So we have 10 degrees that are available here at Miami University across four departments. And our goal is to take you from that student that's at the top that's studying a discipline to being a graduate who is ready to go into the working world as a professional engineer, or professional computer scientist. So our four degrees are across our sorry are 10 degrees are across four departments. The first department is our chemical paper and biomedical engineering department. It has our biomedical and chemical engineering degrees, as well as an engineering management degree with a paper concentration engineering management degree with an environmental focus in an engineering management degree with some process control that goes along with that. The paper environmental science and process control are miners that you can match up with it. The next department is our electrical and computer engineering department that has computer engineering, electrical engineering and robotic engineering degrees in it. They also have an engineering management degree track available there where it's engineering management with a focus on electronics. Then you can see the engineering management degree we have there. It is of course in all three of our departments and our last engineering department is our mechanical and manufacturing engineering degree. And you can see that the two degrees on the slide that they offer are mechanical engineering and manufacturing engineering. And their engineering management track is focused on manufacturing. Our Fire Department is our computer science and software engineering department CSE. So four departments chemical paper and biomedical they acronym for that as CPB. Then there's electrical and computer. That's ECE. Then there's mechanical and manufacturing. That's MME. And finally, computer science and software engineering CSE. So if I slip into using the acronym, those are what they stand for. All of our degrees except for robotics, engineering and engineering management are a bit accredited. There's two different reasons why those degrees are not able to credited right now. Robotic engineering is our newest degree, it was just approved by the state of Ohio this past fall. And the class that's going to join us in the fall of 2021 will be the very first class that can actually start as a robotics engineering major. Having said that, we started teaching robotics classes this past fall, and we've had some current students who have switched or added robotics engineering to their major. You cannot ask to have the a bit accreditation folks come in and look at your program until you have three years of graduating classes. One of the gentlemen that has switched into robotics engineering is a junior this year, he will be graduating a year from this spring and that will be our first graduating class. So those of you that are joining us in 2021, we'll be bringing you a better creditors in after your sophomore year, because we will have three years of graduating seniors by that time.

We've had a lot of success being a bit accredited, and we do not anticipate having any problems with a robotics engineering. Now those of you that aren't familiar with an A better credit ation. A bit is an organization that brings in specialists and each of these degrees whether it be biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering, computer science, where they come in and they look at your curriculum. If your curriculum meets all the requirements for that particular specialty, to become a professional in that area, then you are a bit accredited for five years. They don't come back for another five yours to look at how you're doing. If you have a few problems, they accredit you for three years, they give you some notes, and you've got to fix them. If you do poorly, they come back in a year. And if you don't fix the issues, you'll lose your a bit accreditation. There are Engineering and Computing schools that are not a bit accredited, and you will get a job out of them. The difference being an eight that accredited program for each particular specialty shortens the path to getting your professional stamp, whether that be from IEEE from electrical engineering, whether it be from algae, for chemical engineering, all of these technical degrees, have a professional organization that has certain requirements in order for you to get your professional engineering or computer science stamp. The other one that's not a bit accredited is engineering management. And that was a conscious decision that was made by our dean at the time Mark DLR, not to a better credit, our engineering management degree, when he reached out to him 18 years ago to ask him to come in. And look, they said they wouldn't a better credit it because of the fact that our classes are taught by business professionals and not by engineers. With that, the dean went back and said, Yes, but our business school has a top 10 in the nation ranking. And we would rather have accounting finance supply chain logistics taught by professionals. And so it was a conscious decision not to have an A that accredited. For those of you that are just joining. On the third slide here, I've just run through what the majors are. And at the end, I'll be taking any questions and answers from the people who are joining me virtually. We also have a large number of minors and master's programs in the College of Engineering and Computing. Now, at Miami, we have the former School of Business, we have the College of Education, Health and Society, the College of creative arts, and the College of Arts and Science, and they all have additional majors, minors and masters. And many of our students that come to Miami University do double major, or get a single major with several minors, you are not just restricted to the minors on this list. These are just the minors that are available in the College of Engineering and Computing. So right now you're thinking about coming and going to college to get your bachelor's degree. The only reason that the master's programs are on there, and all four of our departments do have a master's program is that some students are interested in what we call our four plus one program. In your junior year, if your GPA is good enough, you can go to your department chair and ask that in your senior year, you take your senior level classes as a graduate student, so instead of them being 400 level, they're switched to 500 level. And you do some additional research and some additional writing so that they count towards your graduate program. Then the plus one is after you finished your senior year, you stay for another year. And you do your research and you write your thesis paper. For many of our students that come with a lot of AP or IB credit, that actually turns into a three plus one because they come with so many credits that they're actually a junior at the end of their second year here. So it's an option that some are interested in. Typically a master's in any of the engineering programs is a bump between 10 to 20 k depending on your specialty, having a bachelor's and a master's in it. So it does give a slight bump in starting salary.

So I've talked about the fact that our engineering and our computer science degrees are a bit accredited. And that shows that you are getting a good technical degree in that engineering discipline or in that computer science discipline. But at Miami University, all students are required to take the Global Miami Plan. And that's a tie into the liberal education process. So liberal education is all about making sure that the students that graduate from Miami University truly understand and have knowledge of human culture and the natural world, but also understand what their individual and social responsibilities are as as well as having those skills that are necessary to perform well in the business world as intellectual and practical skills. So when you marry that Global Miami Plan with that a bit accredited degree you become a very well rounded person. We also in the College of Engineering and Computing, feel very strongly that it's important that a student learn about their particular discipline in class and then practice it in the laboratory. So experiential learning is very Very important. Because we do not have PhD programs in the College of Engineering and Computing, all of our classes are taught by your department faculty, you will not be taught by PhD students because we don't have them. So you'll take a class, let's use a mechanical or chemical engineering class, a thermo class, you will learn about thermodynamics in the class. And then you'll go in the laboratory and you'll actually do work in the laboratory with your hands on that particular topic. It is critical that you see the practical application to what you're learning from a book that ties into the fact that your professor is in the class, and then he's in the lab with you. So you are going to develop a very strong student faculty bond, if you choose to do so because you are going to see your faculty members. In fact, we only have a little less than 100 master's students here. You are going to see the master's students in the labs. And we jokingly say, for the mechanical engineers, the reason that they're in the labs is we want to graduate you in four years with all 10 digits. Because when you go into the lab as a sophomore, you're going to learn how to plasma cut, you're going to learn how to weld, you're going to learn how to operate a metal lathe. So it's dangerous equipment. So that professional wants some additional additional eyes on you to make sure you don't do anything that would be detrimental to your fingers. It's true across all four departments. So in computer science, having the professor in your class where you're learning about the coding, and then when you're in the lab actually doing the coding, it's nice to have an extra set of people walking around the lab in case you have any questions. So develop that strong faculty students bond. In the fourth bullet, yes, we are yelling at you. That is purposely in caps students success is our goal. But we don't define what your success is. Your success can be different depending on who you are. And at the age you're at right now, you may not know what it is you want to accomplish, and that is 100%. Okay. You will have time when you come to Miami. in your first year, you'll be able to explore within the engineering fields. And it's not really until after your third semester that you really should have determined what type of track you want to be in. In your first year you're going to be taking math and science, some of your Global Miami Plan courses, and to engineering courses in computer science, you're actually going to start doing some programming in your freshman year. It's not until your sophomore year that you start to get into some of the more specialized areas that you will study depending on which engineering track or which computer science track you go into. So you have time to decide. There are other students though that know right now that they want to go in, they want to be an entrepreneur, they want to get their, their chemical engineering degree, they have this great idea on how they can clean up the environment with a chemical engineering degree and they want to get out and start their own business.

That's their goal. We've got other folks that decide, okay, I think I want to get out and I want to go to work for a place like Google or Facebook or Amazon. And so that's their goal. So the computer science department sets them up so that they can reach that goal. Others say, No, I'm from a small community, there's a manufacturing plant there. And my goal is to get out, get a manufacturing degree and go to work. And then another set of goals is we have folks that really really are interested in going on to medical school or law school, or going on and getting their masters or PhD and become a research engineer or research computer scientists. And we will assist you in those goals. You define them. It's our goal that you'd be successful in what you want to do. Now tying back into that strong student faculty bond is the fact that once you're accepted at Miami and you confirm when you come to register for your classes, you are going to be assigned a faculty advisor on day one entering the college, you will have a faculty member who you can talk to, to talk specifically about what you're trying to accomplish in that degree. And I really encourage you to use those faculty advisors, you have to use them the very first time you register. You'll have a 20 to 30 minute appointment with them before you even register for your first class at Miami University. Now, if you ask an electrical engineering faculty member about some class over in the College of creative arts, they probably aren't going to be much help. That's where you've got to go over into the College of creative arts and find a mentor there to help you. If you want to do a major let's say in electrical engineering. piano performance. In fact, we just had a gentleman that graduated from our mechanical engineering program that got his mechanical engineering degree. But he also got concert pianist. And he was the top concert pianist in his class because he won the competition to play with the orchestra. So the left brain right brain engineers and computer scientists have the opportunity to get out and explore, because we're a relatively small Engineering and Computing college on a middle size liberal arts college. So there's opportunities abounding for you to get out and explore and find your passion.

So in the College of Engineering and Computing, we have a program called socially engaged Engineering and Computing, we've pronounced it seek. And you'll see that it aligns very closely with the Global Miami Plan, because we want you guys to be able to design solutions and solve problems that advance the idea of improving the quality of life, individuals in the general well being of communities and societies. So our aspirational goal is that when you graduate, you're socially conscious, globally aware and culturally sensitive. See how that ties in with the Global Miami Plan and the whole idea behind liberal education, along with that technical degree. So these are the pillars of our Sikh program. If you look on the bottom of the slide, you can see there's a curriculum pillar, a co curricular pillar, and a research pillar. The curriculum pillar is our humanitarian Engineering and Computing minor, you can get this minor purely by taking classwork. And if you're very strategic about the classes that you take to fulfill the humanitarian Engineering and Computing minor, most of them will double up for your Global Miami Plan. So you can get dual credit for the classes that you take to meet your Miami Plan. The next one over is the CO curricular pillar. That means you can fulfill some of the requirements for this one, either in class, or you can do stuff outside of class. So the Grand Challenge Scholars Program is a program that is approved by the National Academy of engineers. At the turn of this century, the National Academy of engineers came and sat down and looked at what the grand challenges were facing the world and they had 40 or 45 of them that they were all arguing about. And they distilled it down to 14 grand challenges. Then they asked the universities in the UK and America and China, to graduate students that could possibly help solve those 14 grand challenges. And they said if you will put together a Grand Challenge Scholars Program and submit your program to us, we will either approve or disapprove your Grand Challenge Scholars programs, ours is approved. And what is required of you as a student that wants to become a grand challenge scholar as you sit down with our Director of the program, that's Dr. DJ Rao. And you make your own plan inside a framework that's laid out by our university, on what you need to do to be a grand challenge scholar. So the first thing you have to do is decide which of the 14 grand challenges you want to become a grand challenge scholar, I'm not going to go into all 14 I'll just name a few. provide clean water, urban infrastructure, cybersecurity, stopping cyber terrorism, engineering, better medicines.

Those are just a few of the ones that are out there. Now, the Grand Challenge Scholars Program has five elements to identifying your grand challenge. And one of the things that nav the National Academy of engineers really emphasized is the fact that if you have this great idea and you can't sell it, it's not going to go anywhere. So one element of the Grand Challenge Scholars Program is you have to get some entrepreneurship, learn how to sell things. This is an example of how you can do it by a curricular program or go outside of the curricular program, you could go over to the Farmer School of Business and take a couple of classes on entrepreneurship. Or you could go to work for a small startup in the summer, working with Dr. Rao and say that my work with the small startup taught me how to run a small business. So that's an example of going outside the classroom to fulfill the requirements. So over the course of your four here, four years here, you lay out your plan. You meet all five requirements and at graduation, Dr. Rao certifies to nav that you have met the requirements to be a grand challenge scholar and at that point, the National Academy of engineers recognizes you as a grand challenge scholar. That is a huge deal on your resume, and hopefully, in your own personal passion on what you're trying to accomplish. The final element of our seek program is our research. We have the Miami University Center for assistive technology. There are 17 PhD professors whose common thread in the type of research they're doing is on assistive technology. And as I've said previously, they do not have a Ph. D program in the College of Engineering and Computing. So those professors use undergraduates to help them with their research. Assistive Technology can be something as simple as designing a sippy cup. For people who have gag reflex to stop them from gagging. We had a mechanical engineering professor that worked with undergraduates to design a sippy cup that had electronic flow measuring so they can see the amount of fluid going into the person's mouth and then see if there was backflow to then constrict the flow. And they actually have their name on the patent for that. Another example of assistive technology would be some of our bio engineers are working with 3d bio plotters to print matrix material, so that a burn victim can have their stem cells put into that biomaterial, the antibiotic to stop infection. So instead of going ahead and taking a skin graft off your thigh to put on the burn on your arm, they take this 3d printed material and put it over it and help your arm heal and it grows over it. So those are just two examples of some of the research that the 17 professors are doing in the MCAT, the Center for assistive technology. And as an undergraduate student, if you're interested in research, you can do that. So see connection, I'm actually going to start over on the right hand side of this slide we have in a normal year, this year has not been normal with COVID. We generally have two study abroad programs in the winter term that deals specifically with seek one in Guatemala and one in Mexico. And then we have a summer program that goes to Great Britain, the gentleman that beats the one in Great Britain, you work with a nonprofit designing equipment to help children with disabilities with their different physical therapies. I actually have led the program in Guatemala three times. And I take students down there for 21 to 25 days over winter term. And we go up in the mountains of Guatemala, and we actually live with host families there. And we help them with Engineering and Computing problems over that time. So we have to learn how to listen to the community, see what the issue is. And then we have to design something that is affordable for that particular area with materials that are available. So in the area of Guatemala, the perhaps the typical person, there only earns about $2 a day. The last time we were down there, the problem we were working on was they have rainy season and dry seasons, and they grow a lot of their own food in their own personal garden on their plots of land up in the mountains. They all the villages that we work with pretty much have some form of piped in water, but they do not have any sewer or septic system. And the majority of their sinks are outside of the house in a big cement double sink called a peeler. The water tap turns on and they wash their hands, their clothes, their pots and pans. They get their drinking water from it.

But it flows out the bottom of the peeler and fly flows down the side of the mountain, there is no collection system. So we were looking for ways to collect the water, you have to be able to get the detergent and other particulate matter out of it before you put it on a vegetable crop. And so we had to look at affordable filters. The other thing is, is the villages are on the side of mountains. So if the peeler is below the garden, you have to figure out some way to get the water up to it after it's been filtered. So in America, we'd go out and buy a $500 pump, get a filter on it, plug it into our 110 power, we'd be good to go. That is not an affordable solution there. They don't always have a lot of steady electricity that can't afford a $500 pump. So we used a series of sand and gravity filters for when the garden was below the peeler as a way to do it to filter out the particulate and the detergent before it got to the vegetable crops and root crops. And for the gardens that were above the houses. We walked down the mountain to a city down below that had a hardware store picked up some pvc piping, some O rings and we made hand pumps that could pump water up to 30 meters up the mountain using just basic suction on the pvc piping. So we set up the filter pools and then we pumped from the fourth filter pool up to the garden. So affordable solutions, being able to talk about design A culturally appropriate engineering solution to a problem with fiscal and material constraints is exactly what a company like GE is looking for, is an engineer that knows how to design to the needs of a customer at an affordable level. The middle one is all about our Engineers Without Borders, they have two projects. One is in Rwanda, and one is in Uganda. Both of them are water and sanitation projects. And the students get those projects from the National Engineers Without Borders organization. It is unusual for college to have two projects, typically they only have one. But our club is very, very successful. It's been top in the region multiple years in a row. And so nationally, web lets us have to the actual communities put in the request to the national ones, and then different colleges bid to get the opportunity to work on a project. The students initially go over, see what the issue is, then they come back, and they work with professional civil engineers down in Cincinnati to actually plan the whole problem. And then they go back into the country presented to the community. And in normal years, our students typically go to both projects twice a year. And there are separate teams that work on it. It's a very large and active club, but that is C connection. And the final thing is is in your sophomore year, you can apply to live in the Sikh Living Learning Community and withdrawal Hall. The reason that's significant as Withrow Hall is the closest dorm to the College of Engineering and Computing. So if you're interested in seek, you get to live close to the classroom. So this is the most important slide for all the parents that are out there. And that is, if my child goes to Miami University to study Engineering and Computing, will he or she get a job? And the answer is yes. 80% of our students are already placed by graduation. And the measuring tool that places like US News and World Report use is are they placed within six months of graduation. And from our 2019 class, that's the data we have available right now. 98% are placed six months after graduation placed means they're either in a job in graduate school, med school, law school, or in the military. So very, very successful as they come here. 63 k is the average starting salary for the class of 2019. That is a true number. But it's also sort of misleading. For example, I had a young lady that worked for me a computer scientist, that in between her junior and senior year she went and interned with IBM in New York, working on Watson. After the summer, they kept her on through her senior year as an intern with them. And then when she graduated, they offered her 110 K to go work in New York. Well 110 K and New York isn't where 65 k cuz the cost of living in Ohio, on average are depending on the majors, the average starting salary year after year is somewhere between 50 and 80. k,

the jobs are local here in the tri state region as well as nationwide. We send students computer science students, as I mentioned before to Google, Facebook, Amazon, they're in all of the major financial and banking industries. every industry needs computer scientists. So all across the nation is where the computer scientists go. Our engineers are the same way. How do they find those internships and those jobs? Well, they do it through our Career Center, you have a central Career Center. And there is a dedicated CEC career coach, her name is Aaron Dunn bokor, who will help you learn how to write a resume, learn how to interview so that you can get that first internship and get that first job. But let's say you're still wondering about what you want to try to do well, they'll also help you with career exploration, and do some experiential learning to see how and what type of mechanical engineer you want to be or if you even want to be an engineer anymore. You know, sometimes our plans change as we get into college. And we learn more about ourselves and where our true passions are. The Career Center is also the ones that run our career fairs. They run two large career fairs a year, one in the fall, and one in the spring. The one in the fall is actually a two day event and the second day is actually for STEM majors. This past year, even though it was virtual, we had over 65 companies that were specifically looking for CEC graduates, for internships, and for jobs and all of those companies had multiple jobs and internships. So definitely companies come here, they want you and we have the organization that will help preparing you to be that professional. We talked about experiential learning and the importance of learning in the classroom but also outside of the classroom. We feel that you get your experiential job experience by doing the internships in the summer. We are not a co op school, we do not require a co op like UC or Georgia Tech. But we do have some students who go to work for a company in the summer. And then the company says, Hey, can you stay on for a semester and do a co op with us? Generally, those students who do that end up spending a little bit more than four years here in order to graduate, but the majority of our students graduate in four years, and they get their work experience through an internship in the summer. This is reporting from our may of 2019. Students will have on May of 2020 student data at the end of January beginning of February from institutional research. But 80% of those students reported having at least one internship or Co Op, most of them had multiple 40% of that class reported that they had some level of undergraduate research. We have students that instead of doing an internship actually go off to other universities for a summer and do research with professors there, some of actually stay here and do our summer research program. And that depending on what your long term goal is, is just as important as an internship. Then the last three categories there service learning professional organizations and professional training. Those experiential learning opportunities generally come from the clubs that students are in and I'm going to talk a little bit more about clubs on an upcoming slide. We also at Miami University require every student to do a senior capstone all the other colleges at Miami University, it's one semester long, but in the College of Engineering and Computing, it's two semesters in its entire year. And we call it your senior design courses. In your department, they will have a series of problems that they will present to you and you will bid on which problem you're interested in working on. And then they will assign you to a tune to a team of two, three or four other students to work on that problem. Some of those problems come from outside companies that say we'd like to have a team of undergraduates to work on XYZ for example, for a couple of years, MTD had us working on problems associated with some of the lawn equipment they make for the big box stores. The first time they presented it to us it was to redesign a transmission so that it had to reverse gears to go in there there no model driving lawnmower.

What happens is in the first year, you work with that team to research the problem you interface with the customer. And at the end of the semester, you come up with a contract with that customer on what you're going to produce in the next semester and in the in the example of the MTD lawn mower the students actually had to design and then use the material they have and they MMD high bay to actually produce the transmission and then give it to a working transmission to MTD. Same thing is true for computer science, where they've worked with Eli Lilly, they've worked with Fifth Third Bank to do certain levels of computing or app development work. And then we provide it back to that company. So it really requires you to work with a team of students to interface with a customer, and then produce something at the end of the year. So 100% of our students spend an entire year working in teams doing what you'll be doing out in the working world. We also have a thing called the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute. This is something that you apply for in your second semester of your first year. It typically only take 20 to 25 students into the cohort, so it's very competitive. And then you take an additional class each semester for the next three years. The first year, that pretty much focuses on you yourself as a leader as a follower learning about yourself. In the second year of the program, you work together with your cohort on a particular problem. The one that's illustrated on this slide is they were working on embracing change. And as they were putting that all together and planning their big exposition that they were going to happen the spring COVID came along and they had to switch all that to a virtual embracing change summit that had over 140 participants in it. Then in your senior year, you read books on strategic leadership, you work with the director of the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute, Miss Louise Mormon, on strategic leadership and then she brings in luminaries from industry to talk with you about leading businesses and really interfacing with folks from the Engineering and Computing area. And when you come out of this program, you're ready to go into the working world and hopefully be identified as perhaps a future leader in that organization. Based on all these extra skills that you created on top of your a debt accredited degree.

You've heard me talk about research and the fact that we don't have PhD students here. That gives you the opportunity to actually research if you're interested. And on this slide are 10 of the research clusters that we have in the College of Engineering and Computing. So anything from high performance computing or AI and machine learning for computer science person, biomedical engineering, and biotechnology, if you're interested in drug delivery, or protein engineering, also, we've got tissue engineering available in the engineered advanced manufacturing. And the interesting part to all these different research areas is it allows us to do multidisciplinary research. And so this is just an example of Regenerative Medicine. We have a professor in mechanical and manufacturing engineering that works with companies that make replacement knees and shoulders and hips. And he does a lot of study on the polymers that go into creating that to see how long they would last. So that's a biomaterial implant. We also have professors in our chemical, paper and biomedical engineering department that are actually looking at how to use those bio printers and bio material for tissue engineering, and then working with electrical engineers to implant electronic sensors in that bio material that can be applied to the skin. That's Dr. Jessica sparks that's working with that with the Air Force Research Lab. I mean, there is so many different things if you're interested in getting in there so that you can work and actually dive deep into research if that's your passion. Another example is there's multidisciplinary research is balancing posture, whether that's working with older people with the gerontology department, or with our athletes right here at Miami University through the kinesiology department, or even the psychology department as we look at cognitive psychology as it ties into balance and posture. Now there are mechanical and manufacturing engineering professor Dr. Jim Chang does, he's actually the director of in ukcat, works directly using virtual reality to look at where and when people lose balance, whether it's for an athlete, or whether it's for an older person. He's also working with a team of undergraduates to go ahead and design and insert into the shoe that would give biofeedback, whether it's to an older person that looks like you're about to lose your balance, or to an athlete, so it gives them more performance data. So amazing research goes on here, and you could have the opportunity to join a professor in that research. Student Organizations Miami University has over 400 student organizations that are active and engaged. And if you go on the hub, you'll see there's over 600 because student works ebb and flow depending on student interest, and a College of Engineering and Computing. We have 19 active student organizations right now. All of the professional organizations, the National professional organizations are represented by a student Oregon CC, but I'm talking about is things like the Association of Computing Machinery ACM, that's computer science scientists and software engineering, and even have an ACM W, a specific one for women. Both of those are active clubs here. We've got a SME, the Association of mechanical engineers, we've got I triple D, that's for the electrical engineers, we've got algae that's for the chemical engineers, we've got BMS that's for the biomedical engineers, we've got a that's for people who want to go into aerospace, whether you're an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer, or a mechanical engineer, we've got Tapi if you're interested in going into the paper industry, all of them are represented here. In addition to that, you've got things like the Society of Women Engineers, or the National Society of Black Engineers, or Engineers Without Borders that are focused on a particular group, and helping them develop their professional background. And we have fun things like red Hawk racing. Red Hawk racing has our baja racing vehicle, which we've been operating now for almost two decades. In fact, right before COVID hit we are in a race that we lead up until the last five laps there were over 100 colleges participating and we broke in the last five laps when we came in second. So a very, very competitive baja program where the students design, build and race the car. themselves. And we just are in the process this year of converting our ASE Formula One gas powered car into a Formula One electric car. So the jury's out how successful we'll be joining MIT and Georgia Tech. And you see with the electric car, because this is our first adventure into that. So all of these clubs are out there, in addition to all the other clubs that Miami has to offer, where you can go and in your first year, be a great follower. And then as you go further in there and you find your passion, you can go into a leadership role so that you can highlight that in your resume, and be an active and engaged leader in a student organization.

We get the best and brightest students in the College of Engineering and Computing. And this is just an example of that. These are this year's 2020 probo Student Academic Achievement Award winners from CEC. The Provo Student Academic Achievement Award is the highest achievement that is awarded to a student at Miami University. And you can see that there were just 12 handed out this year, and we got three of them. And we only make up about 13% of the student population. But you see, we won 25% of the awards. And they started handing out this award and Oh wait, they've only handed out 133 of them. And we've won 31 the students that come into college are bright. And I really hope that you come here and continue doing this trend. Now let me talk a little bit about Lexi and Nicolas the two that are on the outside. They're both chemical engineers. When they were a freshman, they started working in Dr. Andrew Jones's biomedical engineering lab. And at that time, Professor Jones was trying to figure out how he could create a drug that is being looked at to help people with PTSD and with depression. And currently, that drug comes from magic mushrooms. That's a hallucinogenic that people get by eating the mushrooms, psilocybin is the name of the drug. But it's hard to get the right dosage and the right amount of how much hallucinogenic is in a mushroom. Unless you do a lot of processing. And it takes a lot of mushrooms to do that. But Dr. Jones had an idea that he could take this bio material, this living organism, that right now, if you and I swallow it, it would give us diarrhea and metabolically change it into psilocybin. So these two freshmen started working with them. And they were successful, and they wrote a research paper on it. And then they both got their names on the patents. And then companies bid to buy the opportunity to work with Miami University, to go ahead and create then commercialize this process to create this drug. We now have 15 undergraduates working in that lab, working with the company that spent $1.4 million to patent it with us, and Lexie and Nicholas have their name on that patent. Next, he has actually gone on to win national level awards is a good fellow scholar, and has also been given the astronaut scholarship. So just some amazing students come into the College of Engineering and Computing. The gentleman in the middle what he's doing in computer science, I can't even begin to explain it has to do with big data analysis for the financial markets as he worked with a professor here at Miami University, some giant brains. So, if you're thinking about applying to Miami University, there is no special applications to get into the College of Engineering and Computing. It's open to any student that is accepted at Miami University. a chemical engineer mechanical engineering or an engineering management major with the paper concentration, you see we say it equals to dollar signs. The reason for that is the average starting salary for a chemical engineer with a paper concentration is our highest starting salary every year. And the second dollar sign is once you are here, and you're in the paper miner, and you've proven that you can take the hard work and get good grades in that area. We have a special foundation that paper science and engineering foundation that is made up of all the paper companies that are members of that community. And each year they annually hand out 265 k was the scholarships to students in the paper program. They also help our students get multiple internships and help them get jobs in the paper industry when they graduate. So then the final thing there is ROTC at Miami University. They have all three services programs, the army naval and air force programs. And in fact the Naval ROTC program has both Navy and Marine Corps to dollar signs are there because Rice with rising high school seniors, you have an inside track on getting a scholarship to Razzi because they hand out about 75% of their scholarships to engineering students and computer science students. And then the second dollar sign is is if you go that route, you're guaranteed a job for at least four years after you graduate to gain experience before you either stay on for career in the military, or get out and go to work in the civilian world. So because you've attended this program, virtually those of you that are here with me today, you will be receiving an email from Candace. And it will include all the stuff that if you were able to visit with us, in person.

Those of you who are watching this as a recording unless you reach out and request it from CDC, you will not be receiving it. Now what I'd like to do is first thank you for spending some time with us today, and learning all about the College of Engineering and Computing. And we look forward to you joining us in the future. And for those of you who are watching it virtually I'm going to stop my recording at this time.