VISITING COMMITTEE of the DEPARTMENT of
MECHANICAL and AEROSPACE ENGINEERING (VCMAE)
SUMMARY OF SPRING 2012 MEETING, April 13, 2012
NOTE:
This document contains only a summary of the above meeting that outlines the
main topics of discussions and highlights the major exchange of information
and decisions reached during the meeting. A detailed record of the discussions
is stored in the archives of the department, along with copies of all the
materials presented at the meeting, as appendices to its minutes.
Attendees:

Members of the VCMAE:
Bob Aquaro, Tracy Baker, John Benner, Christine Cropp, David Doman,
Gary Fleming, William Fourney, Mark Horstmeyer, Neil Jubeck, Rick
Klein, Jim Lewis, Bob Mullins, Tim Pawlak, John Tomblin, Bob Welch,
Scott Wenger, Paul White, Kirk Yerkes

Members of the WVU Faculty:
Dean Eugene Cilento, Drs. Jacky Prucz, John Kuhlman, Victor Mucino,
Greg Thompson, and Mr. Dan Carder

WVU Staff Members:
Pat Goldie, Pamela Gelet, Dave Solley
Welcome and Introductions
 Welcoming remarks and a request for the committee’s advice when it
comes to changes in the curriculum, areas of research, faculty hires etc.
Dean Cilento will join us for an informal discussion later. After lunch we
will talk about what you think employers seeking in the abilities of
graduates. What would make graduates more competitive in the
employment market? John Kuhlman will speak about distant learning
and research funding from the federal government. We will ask your
help in generating revenues to the department. Introduction of Dr. Mark
Horstmeyer from Mississippi State as our new member of the VC. An
introduction was then made by each member.
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 Minutes of the previous meeting were distributed, discussed and voted to
be approved.
 We are in the process of organizing our first MAE Research Day!
 Groundbreaking for the new building is in September. This year is the
125th anniversary of the college and on June 2nd we will begin celebration
and more fund-raising. Our department will move into the new building.
Currently it is scheduled to be completed by 2014, but who knows when
it comes to construction. You have probably heard about the gift the
college received of $34 Million, and if you add the funds from the state
it’s actually $45 Million. Some of these funds will go toward the new
building, but I am sure the Dean will speak about it. This building will
be a major improvement as we are running out of lab space.
 The Provost was not available to speak to you today it is a Board of
Governors Meeting day however we will have someone in the spring
meeting from that level to speak to you.
 We try to renew the charter of this committee every three years. That’s
how the college committee and the university operate as well. During the
summer we will review; there are some members who are not active. We
will come up with new appointments for the fall.
 This past academic year, probably our most important priority was the
faculty searches because it has never happened before to have seven
openings for tenure track position. This is very unusual. It is a
reflection of our success. We were granted four positions this year and
have three from the last year. During the fall semester we screened
applicants, developed some criteria for the searches including weighting
factor criteria such as abilities to do research, publications, writing
proposals and teaching abilities. All of the committees followed a
consistent screening process. With information compiled we narrowed
down to a short list between three and five candidates per application
and those were invited to campus. The offer letter has to be approved by
the Dean and the Provost and then it is sent to the applicant. The Dean
approved them last week. We can’t say who the new hires are until we
receive back the offer letters signed. But we now have three people
identified. These positions are all Assistant Professors. Our salaries are
higher than the national average for Assistant professors which are very
competitive. Full professors however are below the national average.
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 The question was asked what the percentage of state money is coming
into the department verses research money. The answer….minuscule,
the state money is miniscule. Maybe now close to $3 million dollars from
the state but our new research awards were $15 million last year, the
level of research expenditures was close to $12 million dollars. This
would increase with the hiring of new faculty because the salaries of the
new faculty will come from the state but since I’ve been here the amount
of state appropriations was always somewhere between $2 and $3 million
dollars. Another hurdle that we passed was the assessment reports with
the Board of Governors. We had to submit 4 different reports, 2 for the
undergrad programs, 1 Aerospace, 1 Mechanical, and then 2 reports for
the graduate program, 1 Aerospace, 1 Mechanical. We applied for the
program of excellence in education for this program. Rumor is that we
got it, but it’s not official yet. The number of our awards keeps growing
and we’re getting more and more prestigious. We do have now the best
professor in WV in our department, it’s Marcello Napolitano. Next week it
will be recognized at the state capital in Charleston, and there is a
reception at the president’s house. Larry Banta who is in charge of
outreach in our department, he received the Full Bright Scholarship, he’ll
go on professional development in the spring semester 2013. Full Bright
will support his stay in Italy. We are now listed in the National Academy
of Engineering, one of our projects of industry was selected, and Ken
Means is advising that. NAE wants to encourage education that is very
practical for real life problems. We want to move up in ranking, one way
to do it is to be much more proactive than we’ve been in the past, in
applying for national awards. Darran Cairns is in charge of coordinating
applications for awards, and that is probably one reason we more awards
than in the past. This is still confidential, but I can share with you that
Ximbo Liu has been selected as Outstanding Researcher of the college,
Hailin Li and Ken Means Outstanding Teachers, and Dave is an
Outstanding Advisor of the college. Two years ago, Dave got university
recognition, the Nick Evans advising award. The dean asked us not to
publicize these until the college had the opportunity to make
announcements. The students got very prestigious awards; we never had
NSF fellows before.
News & Strategic Plans in the Statler College (Dean Cilento)
 Dean Cilento and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Warren Myers gave
an informal talk. Spoke of trying to get the biomedical engineering
undergraduate degree program for certificates going. This will be housed
in Chemical engineering. This may be something in the future that
another Dean may wish to create a department but that is not where I
want to put my resources. I wish to put my resources in the faculty who
can deliver a program. The President and the Provost are very supportive
of our program. The President has a background in computer science
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electrical engineering and the Provost in biology. They are very strong
supporters of this college and the STEM discipline.
 We had a shift in the naming of the Statler College. Ben and Jo Statler
have been very loyal Ben’s an alumni mining engineering. We have been
working for several years for the Statler gift. On December 12th my first
granddaughter’s christening and I got a text message from Ben and he
said “let’s do it!” That was such great news just before Christmas. With
him it was never about the money but he wanted to know it was going to
make a difference. His gift of $34 Million privately; he is up to $60
million. With the naming we had it’s a $45 million total gift. It will come
in over a few years. There will be $11 million of it has to be paid
beginning of 2015, that’s because of the $11 million WV Research Trust
Fund, it’s a matching dollar for dollar from state to private gifts. When a
donor signs a pledge to pay up by March 2015 they put all that money
up front. So we now have an endowment with $11 million in it but it
takes about a year to get those resources. Currently it pays between 4 &
5% so over the next few years we will see resources in our college to do
some significant things. We will spend it wisely. Ben came out of the
Mining Engineering and he wants this to be the best college possible in
the country. In order to get Ben to name the college, the university has
committee three more senior level positions, $110K to 130K for these
positions. They are willing to put that money up to help us recruit three
Statler Chairs. I want to recruit at least one Statler Chair this summer
that will probably head up energy efficiency. These are five year
appointments, renewable upon mutual agreements. We are going to
have high expectations of these people.

 I inherited a college of about 100 faculty and now we are at 129 faculty.
That counts department Chairs and the administrators we have 11 new
positions that we are recruiting for this fall. That will bring us up to 140.
My goal is to get us to 145 or better by 2015. Over the next few years we
will continue to invest in new faculty of targeted areas.
 Please explain the grant writing workshop. The grant writing workshop
is new and any faculty can attend. We bring in an external consultant
which fits the June schedule best. We do not set up people well for
national awards. If we do not get them nominated then you will never
get them awarded. We developed a program to help with that. Two years
ago in the Wall Street Journal we were recognized as 23rd in the nation
for employers who hired our alums and were happy with them. MAE is
very highly rated in funding and size of the department. One other thing
I would like to mention is the employer ratings on institution on a scale
of 1 to 5, with 5 being excellent, we rate about 2.7. We’re trying to do a
lot with PR and get our name out there in the industry, a number of
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industries rate us a 3 or a 3. I’d like to get companies to rate us a 4. The
reason we got rated high by the Wall Street Journal is that we run a
career fair that has about 150 companies come to campus once a year,
just for engineering. Getting the companies here changes their preordained view of what West Virginia is all about.
Research Status, Overlook and Initiatives (Dr. Ismail Celik)
 I have the toughest job of trying to facilitate dollars coming to the
department, but of course there is more to do. There is more than dust
dollars though. The department is almost half of the college of
engineering. I think people by and large know how to write proposals,
but it’s tough out there, very competitive. I have started a research
highlight posters and brochures for the department. Every few months I
am having a faculty member or group of faculty to exhibit their research
in a poster and create a brochure. This can be carried and displayed at
conferences.
 The first annual department research fair is now on. We have about 40
posters now exhibiting in NRCCE, 34 undergraduate posters, and 35
graduate research posters. Jury members grade them and then an oral
presentation is made and three are selected. We will reward with
monetary funds.
 We will begin having external and internal speakers and ask graduate
student to attend. We will have at leave one or two per semester.
 I have prepared an album of successful proposals with different agencies.
This is exhibited on the 3rd floor in the Department. New faculty if they
want to know how to write a successful proposal to the Dept. of Energy,
NSF or RPE can now take a look at one that has been successfully
funded.
 Dr. Sam Mukdadi has been working in biomedical and has been
publicized and used in Health Sciences and will be soon in our
department. His expertise is in medical imaging, very sophisticated
using ultra sound technology
 The Dean and the President said this university should be a hub for
energy research. Our department is playing a big role in that. We have
been successful in our department getting about one-half million dollars
of funding. We have very close relationships with many research centers
for coal and energy. WVU is leading the clean coal technology. This is a
joint research with the Chinese government and the US government.
WVU is the leader. This is a $20 million program over five years.
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 Have you identified any barriers to get more money from the private
sector? Yes I have. One of them is that we don’t have the infrastructure.
We need to invest in infrastructure so that we have something to offer
the company. We need to move on this now not in five years. The
culture of the university is not there, they don’t like working with
industry. It is much more different that academic research and needs a
different kind of structure. It is one of my goals that the department
goes after private sector funding. We are emphasizing Small Business
Research Fund and we want the faculty to connect with the industry.
BOG Reports on MAE Graduate Programs (Dr. John Kuhlman)
 Undergraduate enrollment is up slowly. MS enrollment is down from the
previous five years. PhD enrolment is fairly steady.
 I am giving our productivity of our faculty, but what about quality? I had
all data for our annual reports. I looked online until I found about three
other program that were ranked near us but above us, that had annual
reports that I could obtain. I found UCLA, Boston University and
Michigan Tech. With this information you can clearly see here is evidence
from another faculty member that we are as productive as many of our
peers. So my opinion, if any program at WVU could be called a program
of excellence, it’s MAE.
 Working on these BOG Reports we have discovered a lot of useful
information that we didn’t know. Definitely we have to publicize that;
include in our annual reports, newsletters etc.
WORKING LUNCH
Current Plans for Undergraduate Curricula (Dr. Greg Thompson)
 Our vision is still to try to get a track or an emphasis area for at least the
mechanical and most likely the aero as well. An NSF/ASME study says
that mechanical engineers of today or in the near future, in the US have
to 5 times more employable than mechanical engineers from overseas.
The reason is that those engineers can be hired at 1/5 the cost than a
US-based ME. So, the first thing I’m going to talk about is some new
courses that we’re putting through at the present time. The first is MAE
102 which is to be an equivalent course to the engineering 102. We want
to try to attract some of those freshmen in their second semester to get
them to start working with us. We’re still going to do the same things
that they do in engineering 102 but we’re just going to provide and
aerospace/mechanical flavor to that course. Its 3 credit hours. We’ll get
calipers in their hands, we’ll use reverse engineering. We have higher
prerequisites than the existing 102 has. This is trying to get more design
at the freshman year. MAE 271 and 371- this is going to be a 1 credit
hour and then 2 credit hours to allow sophomores and juniors to work
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with our capstone design students. We get a lot of interested undergrads
in our projects (Baja, EcoCar) this formally allows them to work with it
and get credit hours. It is not a required course and will probably be
limited to a handful of students per section per course. The criterion for
selection is instructor consent. The sophomore year is for basic CAD
work, the junior level you’re managing those basic sophomores and doing
higher level engineering. By the time you get into that capstone design
course, you have a vision of what needs to be done.
 The other 29 faculty members prevent me from doing it, because I can’t
take them on at the same time, also workload issues. It’s not new but
we’ve opened up MAE 497 to allow UG’s to work with faculty and to allow
grad students in their labs to get credit for research. This would allow
that. There are some faculty members that don’t have money to hire the
students as hourly students. This allows you to get those students into
your lab. These 3 credits do not count towards graduation. This is an
instructor-student 1 on 1, there will be a syllabus created to define what
needs to be done. They can do it at 1, 2 or 3 credit hours. These are not
required and we are not required to teach them, so if our workload goes
up, we do not need to teach them. The main intent was to get more
design, more hands on experience to those undergraduates.
 So everything that we’re doing is to get more design and more teamwork
into the curriculum. I didn’t say team building but that is one of the
driving factors, but to get these specific management aspects we’re still
lacking. A lot of the work that we do is based on student feedback
through online surveys.
 Advising- we have certainly improved on our advising. Dr. Prucz has
spent a lot of effort on advising. We have put a lot of resources in
advising and we’ve got an excellent advisor. The student responses show
we are doing much better.
 Do you also survey non-engineering classes like math support? Not yet.
We are trying to get a handle on our house first. We had some previous
discussions with the Math Department. This is from calendar year
2011, individual sections, individual faculty members, but I removed any
information to discern who taught the actual course. I’m looking at the
grade distributions including withdraw. I want to know if a class has
major withdraws going on. Where you have a vast majority as a certain
grade distribution, this concerns me.
 Do you have a mechanic sub-committee? Clearly that’s an issue.
No, but we need to look at that. We discussed in a prior curriculum
committee meeting about grading guidelines. I think we’re going to lean
towards guidelines for faculty, especially as we bring junior faculty in. I
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think they need a little mentoring on grading. That’s the basic
undergraduate summary.
 I did want to share some laboratory safety. The undergraduate are
looking to go to online training or online classes. We’re looking to
automate it. One of the things we’ve done since January is developing
control charge. We have Kathy Sabolsky as well as Chuck Coleman, and
we’ve hired a master in a safety graduate program. They assess the
laboratories on a monthly basis. They provide feedback and a pathway to
fix the problem. We help the researchers to fix the problems. We provide
them solution paths. We’ve received very positive feedback from all
involved including environmental health and safety. There was a recent
state inspection in which we weren’t fined. Lab safety is much more
prevalent and everyone knows it.
Abilities and Skills Sought by Employers (VCMAE)
 From the perspective of someone who sees graduate 3 to 5 years after
they’ve come out of college at the test pilot school and they are
progressing in their careers. The school is really 3 curriculums; fixed
wing, rotary wing and systems. Within that we have 3 types of students;
pilots, naval flight officers, and a few engineers that come from test
directorates. So we have engineers that represent each of those
disciplines. The school came about because in 1945 some people realized
that we should get serious about flight testing airplanes. Before that the
designer was the test pilot. So at the navy school the engineering
discipline we talk about how the test plane works, how the system works.
No one really wants to pay for a flight tester. So ½ the day is spent in
academics. The other half of the day is flying. They do in the air, take the
data and write about it. The third half of the day as we like to say is
where they do the report writing and analysis. I’ve been there for 25
years and one of the things that really stick out is that they come with
less practical experience. The practical stuff is very important, the Baja
Car, Design/Build/fly, that’s critical to somebody having success. I’m
very impressed with the effort made at West Virginia to make a very
practical school. We get some folks from very highly rated schools and
I’m not sure they know which end of the airplane should go first. The
other thing we find is communication and writing/reporting. It’s gotten to
the point that you get people that cannot put together a logical argument
in a cogent fashion on paper. In a lot of cases they can sit down and
explain it to you, but I being an engineer hate the English department as
much as anybody else, but they can’t construct sentences. The other
thing that has somehow been lost overtime is the ability to write and I
don’t know why. For the most part the students are very well educated
and trained in terms of they understand and are very smart, but the
practical application has to go along with that. If you think about it,
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when a lot of these kids are growing up, they may have never driven a
car, so their experience base is pretty limited. Communication/writing
skills are poorer than they’ve ever been. Can you comment on the number
of technical reports they write in 1 year and they have 2 classes going
concurrently? So, you’re graduating a class every 6 months. There are
only 4 or 5 major reports, but they end up writing daily reports, so in
total about 25 pieces of paper. The last piece we send them is a final
check to fly an airplane. Then they have 10 days to come up with a
report on all the performance, flying qualities, and systems. It’s an
intensive process.
 I had this conversation with Dr. Long 20 years ago, same conversation.
We talked about the lack of hands-on at engineering schools when my
son was beginning his education here. One of the things that attracted
us was Formula SAE. I knew I sponsored a part of that car in his senior
year. The kids that were involved with that project are all having
tremendous careers. So I think that Formula SAE was part of that. I was
disappointed when WV got out of Formula. I’ve hired engineers that
didn’t know a wrench from a screwdriver, a Phillips head, a flat head,
etc. So yea there is a lot of that that is missing. I don’t know how you put
that into your curriculum. Sometimes it’s lacking.
 That’s a societal change. I’m 47 years old, and there are people my age,
like my brother and sister-n-law that can’t adjust the most basic thing.
Fewer people grew up working on engines and farm equipment.
 Today’s generation- people don’t write anything, they all text and do their
own short hand. That’s why 92% of everything we sell in this country has
automatic transmission in it. It’s the same reason they can’t shift.
 What I have noticed is that the computer skills are just awesome.
Freshman can usually use their computer skills to reverse engineer
things. Understanding from that perspective is also a good way to go.
 And on top of the physical skills, we have some young ones coming in
that can’t even get the new environment. We can’t get some of the young
ones to understand that you’ve got to get it right the first time, that you
don’t have iterations. A lot of them cannot adjust well.
 The team we had in ’97, 2 of them had some car experience, they had
built hot rods, but the others did not. That was witnessed by the number
of stitches and broken fingers.
 I’m the essay advisor at my school and I am the loudest voice for
education and I’ve asked the faculty that it be mandated for one of these
teams because of that experience and the totality of that systems view.
 Let me ask you a question on your involvement with the SAE programs,
do you go with the top senior level students?
 No we recruit freshman. I get up and evangelize and we tried to put
simulation in learning because you’re right the freshman kids they know
all about computers more than I do, and we try to have
calculus/physics. It’s kind of like what you do here, we don’t have
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credits. It’s just like Friday night I’m buying pizza for everyone to come.
Here you are trying to put in credits, so you’re removing the barriers for
them and let them be a part of it. I told the kids I was one of these ones
“what’s a wrench?” I played basketball, I was going to pay people to do all
of this for me, right. Never made it. But if I knew I had a role on that
team where I could learn, I would have been on that team.
I think some of the younger people come in with the view ‘I’m ready to do
something right now and I want to do one thing really well’. It’s like what
Tracy was saying ‘no we need someone who can do everything from
overseeing a project. We try to make them generalists to a degree and a
specialist in the area they were hired. My view for new people coming in
is that their education has just become from my standpoint. I think they
have an attitude coming that their education is finished and I’m ready to
work and our view is different.
What I see is they come in and they want to be a manager in 5 years
(laughter) and I sit back and I think ‘you know it’s taken me 30 years to
understand that big picture’.
Tim brought up an interesting point; coming out of college they think
they are individual contributor. What we need them to be able to do is
recognize who the experts are, and to be able to hook up with the right
mentor, and to be able to properly document the problem/proposal, lay it
all out, realize who the subject experts are, team with them, synthesize al
of that and run a project. Very seldom are they going to come out and be
the expert on subject matter in day 1.
One communication problem is that you have great ideas but you can’t
sell them.
 Napolitano: I’m sorry to sound contrary on the experimental courses- I
see it from both sides. I am a strong believer in programs, but I also see
the effects on the academic performance of our students. I have a few
weeks left in my classes, and I know 40% of my students can’t come to
class because they are going to competitions. I think the departments
have to do something with professional society to change the schedule of
the competitions. Their grades are going suffer from this. There’s nothing
I can do about it. I want to do something for these kids; they are working
so hard on these competitions. The last 2 or 3 weeks of the course are
pretty much shut down on the other disciplines. They gain a lot of
valuable experience, but their academic grades cannot reflect it.
 The students always have an anxiety, they’ve had all this academic
exposure but how are they going to apply these tools when they get a real
job? What they don’t always get is that it’s a lifelong learning process.
 I can confirm our customers are interested in multi-scale for sure. From
single part to more components simulation, through multiple physicsmultiple scales simulation they want to see how one component works
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and fit it into larger simulation to do a lot of stuff on the computer more
efficiently.
 Publications- when I got out of school, it was partially based on who I
knew and what I knew, and now a lot of the agencies have gone to
computerized systems. It doesn’t matter now if I know this person or not,
if the screening criterion doesn’t kick out their name, I can’t even talk to
them. I know through the USA jobs system, there’s a spot that says
publications. Most of the time that is left blank by students, but if
somebody has that, it’s extra points to get their named pulled over
someone else. There is a score associated with the name that gets pulled.
You can see how somebody ranks through the computer screening
criteria.
BOG Reports on MAE Undergraduate Programs (Dr. Victor Mucino)
 I would like to give you a brief report on a major undertaking last fall. I
put together a Board of Governors report. We had 4 major reports to be
done, 2 for graduate in ME and AE and 2 were for undergraduate, 1 for
ME and 1 for AE. Highlights- how does the department relate to the
overall strategic plan of the university? There are 5 goals that are part of
the strategic plan for WVU. We have to show which way this program
related to these goals. No other school in WV offers a continuous
bachelor, master and PhD program in ME. The only one that comes close
the WV Institute of Technology Montgomery. We have about 600
students all graduate and undergraduate. 450 are undergraduates
(without counting the freshmen) plus another 150 graduate students at
least. When you look at the amount of money that they pay for tuition…
Most of our grad students have a stipend and tuition waiver but tuition
paid by undergraduate students plus their living expenses that they
bring into the state. When you add the amount of funding that the
department receives in research, we are talking about $25 million for
Mechanical Engineering. It has been recognized that the production of
engineers in the US is not what we need in the future. We are not
producing at the rate, the circumstances are requiring. And consequently
there is an emphasis to produce more engineers. According to a meeting
that took place, there is a need for the 5x engineers, an engineer that is
worth 5 times the counterparts from abroad. We have 3 basic objectives1. Proficiency in the field. 2. Being able to respond to the demands of the
workforce. 3. Lifelong learning. Also we have ABET outcomes. .
 We want to see how good these assessments/trends are. Here I have the
surveys and the composite ratings of the surveys. We have the same
ratings for the objectives. Those assessments were conducted for
Mechanical and for the Aerospace program.
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 It’s important to view the assessment of our own work and compare it
with our grading. The NSF provided a rating of 22nd in funding for
research. We were ranked #23 by the Wall Street Journal and that
actually put us on the map. So this is evidence that our program is
highly ranked by external entities. That give you an idea of what was
included in the Board of Governors report.
 How are we going to continue to improve learning outcomes? ABET is an
on-going activity that is here to stay. This semester we were too busy
with the searches to do the 2011 assessment, so we postponed it until
fall or spring. We developed a mapping approach to relate surveys,
learning outcomes and educational objectives. We have active
engagement with Mexico and Italy. Larry Banta is going to Italy as a
Fulbright Scholar. So we have and are working many graduate exchange
programs. We have to have a better understanding of what our course
objectives and learning outcomes are. We need to carefully review the
syllabi and make sure of the learning outcomes and the same thing for
objectives.
MEETING WITH STUDENTS (Already sent out)
Cost Benefit Tradeoffs of Distance Learning (Dr. John Kuhlman)
 A summary of what’s been done so far. Victor Mucino & I met with the
distance learning people at the university. I met with the Associate Vice
President of Distance Learning. Local in person delivered no thesis
masters programs, we had one of those in the 80’s, and it was delivered
at Potomac State. I learned some different possibilities about modes for
distance education. In this department no one has done anything. This
increases the availability of courses, which is a problem we have. We’re
at a standstill in our department right now with this.
 Our Intent with this is to make money. The benefits are to broaden the
available coursework.
 You have to have a niche, and you guys have it with the engine stuff. It
helps with reputation. The biggest burden will be in faculty who don’t
want to do it, because they have never done it that way before.
Status and Business Plans of the CAFEE (Mr. Dan Carder)
 Our vision is to be a world leader in not only our traditional fuel, engine
and emissions, but to extend that into a larger energy portfolio and
power systems and try to grow that even larger over flight
accommodation and emissions inventories. Our strengths would be that
we do a lot in house, we build custom laboratories, we got our start 20
years ago, when the DOE came to us to build the world’s largest vehicle
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emissions testing laboratory. We delivered on that and have been up and
running ever since. Our programs are for industry and they are not
related to # of graduate students. We have 3 month contracts; we believe
we use multi-faceted approaches. We have software for software
engineers in our group. We try to be as interdisciplinary as much as we
can beyond engineering.
 Business model- what our current state was, we’ve been over a 20 year
period, a 4 to 5 million dollar enterprise, we peaked around the 2003
time frame when our director Don Lyons, former Chair stepped down and
Nigel Clark took over. We have tried to reduce staff according to those
dollars. In general I think we became complacent, and focused more on
the phone ringing.. For undergraduate we’ve never really targeted in
educational needs. We have begun meeting with graduate students twice
a month and doing mock interviews, job interviews, and those kinds of
activities. This wasn’t available before. We videotape the interviews and
send out to HR people we know. They critique them and let students
know what they need to do. Future initiatives- increase proposal
submissions, a lot of people from industry come to us wanting
standardized testing, standardized measurement. We’re trying to extend
our research portfolio and to get extra consultants out there to represent
our organization. We need to be more pursuant with federal programs,
developing with the managers. We would like to develop some type of
review panel that looks at CAFEE that meets at least bi-annually this
would give us some direction on where our operations are lacking.
 We will put together a business plan from the dean in the next month or
so. Probably we’ll have to go with reductions in staff to bring the
alignment with current revenues. Much of our earlier funding through
congressional funding. CAFEE can operate as a business entity and be
self-sufficient.
VCMAC Business, Wrap Up, Action Items (Dr. Jacky Prucz)
 The next meeting will probably be October 12th. Let me know any
additional thoughts you may have. We will try to develop 2 documents; 1
is the summary from the graduate students, and the other is a draft
letter for the committee about the changes in our undergraduate
program. Hopefully the searches will wrap up soon and I’ll get the
minutes out to you sooner. One last comment about CAFEE- at least 2 of
the new positions, the faculty will provide much needed support for
CAFEE. I’m very optimistic. They lost faculty and are not active not in
writing proposals. They got complacent because the money was coming
too easily but it’s not anymore. We are all aware you don’t get funding
unless you write proposals. Thank you very much for coming!
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