Graduate Degree Requirements

***Please read the attached memo, which describes significant changes to the MAE graduate degree requirements***

Requirements

The faculty of the department strives to offer graduate courses that will challenge the students’ capabilities, inform them of cutting-edge innovations, and develop in them an appreciation of the beauty and history of our discipline. Toward these ends, our curriculum has three goals:

  • To ensure that all graduates possess a broad knowledge of the fundamentals underlying Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
  • To ensure that all graduates have a depth of knowledge within one of three fields of study.
  • To provide sufficient flexibility within our program for interdisciplinary students, acknowledging the great diversity within MAE and its emerging areas.

The Curriculum
Graduate students in our program choose a field of study from one of the following three disciplines:

  • Solid Mechanics
  • Dynamical Systems & Control
  • Thermofluids

To ensure depth, students in the MS and PhD program are required to take three Core courses within a chosen discipline. Descriptions of the Core courses for each discipline are given below. To ensure breadth, students  must take courses from disciplines outside their field of study (one  course for MS and two courses for PhD). Students must also take an Engineering Analysis course from an approved list covering a broad array of analytical and computational techniques. These requirements do not apply to Masters of Engineering students (see below for details regarding this program).

Thermofluids – Three Core courses:

1. MAE 6100 – Thermomechanics

2. MAE 6310 – Fluid Mechanics I

3. MAE 6110 – Heat and Mass Transport Phenomena

Solid Mechanics – Three Core courses:

1. MAE 6020 – Continuum Mechanics with Applications

2. Any two courses from the following list:

  1. MAE 6070 – Theory of Elasticity
  2. MAE 6080 – Constitutive Modeling of Biosystems
  3. AM 7080 – Inelastic Solid Mechanics
  4. AM 7140 – Nonlinear Elasticity Theory

Dynamical Systems and Controls – Three Core courses:

One course from each of the following three categories:

1. Dynamics

  1. MAE 6210 – Analytical Dynamics OR
  2. MAE 6250 – Multibody Mechanical Systems

2. Systems

  1. MAE 6620 – Linear State Space Systems OR
  2. MAE 6230 – Vibrations

3. Control

  1. MAE 6610 – Linear Automatic Control Systems
  2. MAE 7650 – Multivariable Control

The approved Engineering Analysis courses cover a variety of analytical and computational results useful for investigation across the department’s disciplines. To fulfill requirements, the student must take at least one of the following courses:

MAE 6410:  Engineering Mathematics I

MAE 6420:  Engineering Mathematics II

MAE 6430:  Statistics for Engineers and Scientists

MAE 6710:  Finite Element Analysis

MAE 6720:  Computational Fluid Dynamics I