Entrepreneurship Courses

ENGRC 335
Communications for Engineering Managers
This seminar focuses on communications in organizational contexts common to engineering graduates. Topics may include internal and external communications; balancing visual and verbal elements in documents and oral presentations; teamwork and leadership; running and attending meetings; management strategies; and communicating with colleagues, superiors, subordinates, and clients. Students develop writing and management strategies that they apply in individual and team assignments. They learn how to organize technical and managerial information, articulate and support ideas, and communicate with technical and nontechnical audiences.

ENGRG 235
Career Development for Engineering
Introduces concepts and techniques that can be used now and in the future to set appropriate personal and professional career goals.

ENGRG 461, M&AE 461, OR&IE 452
Entrepreneurship for Entrepreneurs
Develops skills necessary to identify, evaluate, and begin new business ventures. Topics include intellectual property, competition, strategy, business plans, technology forecasting, finance and accounting, and sources of capital. A rigorous, quantitative approach is stressed throughout, and students create financial documents and plans, analyze human resource models, and work with sophisticated valuation methods, complicated equity structures, and legal and business documents. As such, this course represents the “red meat” of entrepreneurship, and the soft skills are left for other courses. Course work consists of discussions, assignments, and the preparation and presentation of a complete business plan.

ENGRI 127, M&AE 127
Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Engineering
Provides a solid introduction to the entrepreneurial process to students in engineering. The main objective is to identify and to begin to develop skills in the engineering work that occurs in high-growth, high-tech ventures. Basic engineering management issues, including the entrepreneurial perspective, opportunity recognition and evaluation, and gathering and managing resources are covered. Technical topics such as the engineering design process, product realization, and technology forecasting are discussed.

BEE 489
Engineering Entrepreneurship, Management, and Ethics        
The course focuses on how to start a new company centered on engineering or biological technologies. Course objectives include coverage of: entrepreneurship principles, fund raising, negotiation, financial calculations (internal rate of return, time value of money, proforma statements); legal structures of businesses; project management; and to develop an awareness of issues related to professional ethics; and technical writing and communication. Majority of work done in teams including a complete business plan that is presented to angel investors. Business plans must require less than $100K in startup funding and may result in actual investment by the angel investor group.

BEE 533
Engineering Professionalism
This course provides a review of an engineer’s professional responsibilities for the health and welfare of the public and discusses pertinent management principles for a professional engineer. Case histories on engineering ethics will be reviewed. Students are required to write their own personal statement on integrity. Approximately half of the class time will be dedicated to review materials associated with the NY Fundamentals of Engineering exam. Significant out-of-class time will be required to successfully pass the FE exam.

CEE 593
Engineering Management Methods
Methods for managing data and transforming data into information. Modeling as a means to synthesize information into knowledge that can form the basis for decisions and actions. Application of statistical methods and optimization to managerial problems in project design, scheduling, operations, forecasting, and resource allocation.

CEE 594
Economic Methods for Engineering and Management
Introduces economic concepts and uses them to select, calibrate and apply proper analytic decision tools in engineering design and management. Topics include market analysis and pricing strategies; production choices and cost estimation; input acquisition and employee motivation; project evaluation and the cost of capital; decision-making in risky and uncertain environments; industry structure, bidding strategies and game theory; plus the regulatory and ethical consequences of overall managerial strategies.

CEE 690
Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership
Graduate course designed to help aspiring engineering managers to better understand individual creativity and organizational innovation and to develop the required skills to play a productive role in fostering both. Not incidentally, the course will also help students who take it to become more creative themselves. The course is highly participative and has a flow that moves from the individual-—to the group-—to the organization, with theory, research results, and practical skillsdevelopment woven seamlessly together.

OR&IE 453
Revenue Management
Covers revenue management concepts, models used in practice, and possible extensions; forecasting techniques, including time series methods, booking curves, and customer preference models; demand uncensoring; overbooking and optimization with emphasis on stochastic models of demand, benefit measurement; computational and technological issues; bid-prices and dynamic programming techniques; examples from the airlines, hotels, car-rental agencies, restaurants, and other industries.

OR&IE 893-894
Enterprise Engineering Colloquium
Weekly meeting for master of engineering students. Discussion with industry speakers and faculty members on the uses of engineering in the economic design, manufacturing, marketing,and distribution and goods and services.

BEE 687
The Science and Engineering Challenges to the Development of Sustainable Bio-Based Industries
Environmentally sustainable alternatives for our energy and chemical needs are critical. This seminar series explores challenges facing the development of industries that use biologically derived materials to produce useful chemicals and energy for society. Topics include natural products from biological systems, conversion of biomass to fuel and other commodities, and the use of biological systems for environmental bioremediation.

Engineering Courses

OR&IE 435
Introduction to Ge Theoryam
Broad survey of the mathematical theory of games, including such topics as two-person matrix and bimatrix games; cooperative and noncooperative n-person games; and games in extensive, normal, and characteristic function form. Economic market games. Applications to weighted voting and cost allocation.

CIS Courses

CIS 300
Introduction to Computer Game Design
Investigates the theory and practice of developing computer games from a blend of technical, aesthetic, and cultural perspectives. Technical aspects of game architecture include software engineering, artificial intelligence, game physics, computer graphics, and networking. Aesthetic and cultural aspects of design include art and modeling, sound and music, history of games, genre analysis, role of violence, gender issues in games, game balance, and careers in the industry. Programmers, artists, musicians, and writers collaborate to produce an original computer game.

CIS 400
Advanced Projects in Game Design
Project-based follow-up course to CIS 300. Students work in a multidisciplinary team to develop an original computer game or an application that explores innovative game technology. Students have the goal of submitting their work to a contest or conference. Grading is based on completion of project plans and documentation, 191 teamwork, presentations and  demonstrations, class participation, and quality of final projects. Instructional meetings are arranged based on student and instructor schedules.

CS 501
Software Engineering
Introduction to the practical problems of specifying, designing, and building large, reliable software systems. Students work in teams on projects for real clients. This work includes a feasibility study, requirements analysis, object-oriented design, implementation, testing, and delivery to the client. Additional topics covered in lectures include professionalism, project management, and the legal framework for software development.

INFO 130
Introductory Design and Programming for the Web
and a pervasive and powerful resource in our society and culture. To build functional and effective web sites, students need technical and design skills as well as analytical skills for understanding who is using the web, in what ways they are using it, and for what purposes. In this course, students develop skills in all three of these areas through the use of technologies such as XHTML, Cascading Stylesheets, and PHP. Students study how web sites are deployed and used, usability issues on the web, user-centered design, and methods for visual layout and information architecture. Through the web, this course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of information science.

ENGRD 251
Engineering for a Sustainable Society
Case studies of contemporary environmental issues including pollutant distribution in natural systems, air quality, hazardous waste management, and sustainable development. Emphasis is on the application of mathematics, physics, and engineering sciences to solve energy and mass balances in environmental sciences. Students are introduced to the basic chemistry, ecology, biology, ethics, and environmental legislation relevant to the particular environmental problem.

ENGRI 113, CEE 113
Sustainability Design for Appledore Island
The course utilizes a unique environment, Appledore island, as an example of how sustainability is addressed in the design of basic components of the built environment; energy, water supply and waste treatment. Students will present preliminary designs of sustainable systems to the engineering staff of Appledore Island. Students learn how to design: reservoirs to provide water during droughts, aqueducts to transport water, and water treatment plants to prevent waterborne diseases. The course includes field trips, building a computer-controlled miniature water  treatment plant, and exploring new technologies for making safe drinking water.

BEE 401
Renewable Energy Systems
Introduces energy systems with emphasis on quantifying costs and designing/optimizing renewable energy systems to convert environmental inputs into useful forms of energy. Covers solar energy, small-scale hydropower, wind, bio-conversion processes, house energy balances. Focuses on the technologies and small-scale system design, not policy issues. Use of spreadsheets is extensive.

BEE 487
Sustainable Energy Systems  
Offers a systems approach to understanding renewable energy systems (solar, wind, and biomass) and their conversion processes, from various aspects of biology, physics, engineering, environmental impacts, economics, and sustainable development.

CEE 455
AguaClara: Sustainable Water Supply Project
Student teams conduct research, build working models, design full-scale prototypes, create design algorithms, and create educational materials for technology transfer to improve drinking water quality in Honduras.

CEE 665
Environment/Energy and Transportation Planning and Management
The course focuses on the nexus of transportation and environment, energy, and climate-change concerns. It is interdisciplinary: drawing upon transportation, environment, urban planning, statistics, economics, and policy. The course covers both the theoretical and practical aspects of relevant topics including mobile emissions inventory estimation, renewable fuels, air quality impact and life cycle benefit assessment of alternative fuels/vehicles, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and urban sprawl, and congestion mitigation and air quality (CMAQ). Students will apply course materials to real-world cases and projects.

CHEME 572
Managing New Business Development
Case study approach introducing the typical fundamental factors driving a business venture, examines how to develop implementation strategies for the venture, and teaches the project management skills necessary to successfully implement the venture.

SYSEN 101
Getting Design Right: A Systems Approach
This course is a freshman-level exposure to the product design process. The process of getting design right is sometimes called systems engineering. We explain the process using the acronym DMEODVI (Define, Measure, Explore, Optimize, Design, Verify, and Iterate). The process begins with understanding customer requirements and ends with validating the design against those requirements. It can then be iterated to greater levels of design detail. The focus is not on detailed engineering design but rather on the process of ensuring that the detailed design will meet the needs of the customer. Students work through the steps of the process with reference to a particular product design challenge. The course is web-delivered using the Blackboard learning instruction system. Pre-requisites: high school mathematics and science, and familiarity with spreadsheet modeling (e.g., MS Excel).

ENGRG 298, ECE 298
Inventing an Information Society
Explores the history of information technology from the 1830s to the present by considering the technical and social history of telecommunications, the electric-power industry, radio, television, computers, and the Internet. Emphasis is on the changing relationship between science and technology, the economic aspects of innovation, gender and technology, and other social relations of this technology.]

MS&E 481
Technology Management
Designed to provide students in engineering and the sciences with the knowledge and analytical skills to manage RD for a strategic competitive advantage. Most organizations recognize the critical importance of RD management in becoming and remaining world-class competitors. The course uses a combination of case studies, readings, discussions, and outside lectures. Topics include technology evaluation, RD portfolio, intellectual property portfolio and management, technology transfer, and technology, policy, and society.