Electrical and Systems Engineering
Systems Engineers provide technical management for societal-scale problems that often encompass the connections between the physical and the information world. Examples of the many cutting-edge applications include autonomous robotics, smart buildings, national power grid management, global networks, service optimization, and biological systems. Systems engineering is the set of reusable mathematics, intellectual tools, and methodologies for attacking large-scale engineering problems. These common tools are adaptable for problems in different engineering domains (e.g., electrical, mechanical, biological, chemical, and computing) and help us understand, design, and manage systems that contain elements from multiple domains. Systems engineering deals with how we extract useful, abstract models from lower level systems, use these models to analyze and predict behavior, and use the analysis to control behavior and optimize/synthesize solutions. System engineering helps us understand what happens when we compose many elements, each with their own behavior, and how to design and constrain the individual elements to engineer desired behavior for the composed system.
*If MATH 2400 is taken, ESE 2030 will not count. If ESE 2030 is taken, MATH 2400 will not count.
*This category requires 10 CUs, including two 0.5 CU Natural Science Labs. Several courses above are 1.5 CU and already include 0.5 CU Natural Science Lab. If the courses selected do not total 10 CUs, you will be required to complete the additional CUs with up to two 0.5 CU Natural Science Labs from: BIOL 1124, CHEM 1101, MEAM 1470, PHYS 0050, PHYS 0051, or another department approved Natural Science Lab.
*ESE 1110 may be replaced with another department-approved engineering course if not taken freshman year.
Select 3 from the following:
Select 1 from the following:
The Societal Application Elective requirement is designed to give SSE majors the opportunity to explore the existing or potential use of systems engineering tools and concepts to address pressing societal challenges, needs and opportunities. The following list of approved courses is not intended to be exhaustive but rather illustrative of the broad diversity of offerings in other departments across the University that can be used to fulfill this requirement. You can take three courses from one or more areas in the main list below.
Students who wish to meet the requirement with courses not presently on the main list should plan to petition the SSE Undergraduate Chair with a proposal that includes the complete triplet of courses planned together with a few sentences of justification along the lines of some of the annotations below.
Biological Systems
Biology is undergoing a rapid revolution from a descriptive to a quantitative science. Because every aspect of social life is impacted in many different ways by insights and methods from biology, there are many opportunities to apply systems thinking and tools to the emerging new biological disciplines with significant social impact. The present list includes courses for which the quantitative aspects of the science are well enough established that the links to model based systems concepts and tools are immediate.
Human Factors
Climate
Energy
There is by now a broad and deep agreement within the climatological sciences that anthropogenic disturbances have begun to change the earth’s climate in ways that will have increasingly dramatic social impact. The present list includes courses respecting which the links to quantitative systems concepts and tools are immediate.
Quantitative Modeling
Business systems offer myriad engineering opportunities with huge social impact at the interface between “soft” behavioral, descriptive phenomena and “hard,” formally represented quantitative processes. The present list includes courses that focus on expanding and exploiting the role of formal representations and quantitative analysis in business systems applications.
City Planning
Transportation
Within the domain of social studies, the design and management of human transportation systems offers one of the most established venues for formal modeling and analysis. The present list includes courses respecting which the links to model based systems concepts and tools are immediate.
Chemical Processing
Although many of the technical engineering electives available to SSE majors already address systems properties of physical devices and technology, our present SSE curriculum does not offer many connections to chemical engineering systems despite their huge social impact and importance. The present list is intended to facilitate making that connection.
Communications
Today’s society benefits from a world-wide infrastructure that permits the exchange of information between physically separate points. Planning, optimization, and implementation of this infrastructure is rich in applications for systems engineering.
Robotics
Our society is increasingly exploiting human-built machines that manipulate objects in the physical world. The design, optimization, and deployment of these machines demands the trans-disciplinary skills embodied in systems engineering and leverages model-based system engineering.
Machine Intelligence
The use of computers to automatically identify patterns in data and give responses that would mimic or exceed the intelligent answer that a human would give is becoming a powerful tool to address many societal-scale problems, including business, health, manufacturing, transportation, and logistics. These courses build upon the quantitative signal and information processing and decision making skills in systems engineering and show how they can be be expanded to engineer knowledge and learning systems.
*Only the “Technology Law and Ethics” section will count for the degree.
Select 4 CUs of:
*Must include a Writing Seminar. See the SEAS UG Student Handbook.
Select 2 CUs of:
