zionhafates

By MARTIN J. KIDSTON
Independent Record - 02/23/2009

With growth and self-promotion in mind, Carroll College will run with the big dogs this spring when it hosts a regional engineering conference in Helena, drawing 300 students from major universities across the Pacific Northwest.

Planned for the first week in April, the conference marks the progress Carroll's civil engineering program has made since it turned out its first class of engineering graduates nine years ago.

That class was comprised of just three students, and it would take another year before ABET, or the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, would fully recognize Carroll's program in 2001.

But less than a decade later, 65 students are now enrolled in the program while two, and possibly three new tracks within civil engineering could be created as Carroll celebrates its centennial this year.

John Scharf, who graduated from Carroll in 1973 and now holds a professorship in engineering at the school, said the program is unusual for a small liberal arts college.

"Ours is only one of two schools in the country that offer a bachelor of arts in engineering," said Scharf, noting the other was Rice University. "Our goal is to establish ourselves as one of the premier undergraduate civil engineering programs in the nation."

$Engineering$

As many as 300 students from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska and British Colombia will attend the three-day event. The conference will focus on topics ranging from civil engineering to sustainability.

"The point is to bring students together in a format that allows them to do some friendly competition, get to know each other and get to know how to apply engineering principals to what they're doing," said Gary Fischer, head of Carroll's engineering program. "It means quite a bit to us to be able to host this."

The evolution of the school's civil engineering program reads like a time line of incremental successes. Freshmen students were first admitted to the program in 1995, with the first three graduating in 2000. Carroll then received accreditation in 2001, and its Engineering Building opened in 2003.

Five years ago, when making its long-range plans, the college set a target of 75 students for the engineering program. Scharf believes Carroll is on pace to achieve that, and possibly surpass it, as future plans are set.

"We feel that given our physical and human resources, 75 students would fit our capacity very well," he said. "But we're looking to expand in the future."

Part of that expansion will likely include adding at least two new programs within the department. Among them stands a new emphasis in engineering mechanics and an alternate track within civil engineering focusing on environmental work.

Both programs have already been approved by the faculty and are pending final approval by the board of regents. A third emphasis in public health engineering is also being discussed, Scharf said.

"We're also planning on expanding our facilities," Scharf said. "We built the current facility to handle a capacity of 75 engineering students and designed it with the ability to expand."

Expansion may lie down the road, Scharf admitted. The current engineering facility, which opened in 2003, was made possible by several benefactors at a cost around $1 million, Scharf said.

"We're looking at adding a loft area in the existing lab space, or actually adding another addition to the building to more than double the size of the floor area," Scharf said, naming some options currently under consideration. "We're looking at a new long-range plan out to 2015 and what our enrollment goals should be."

For now, Fischer said, the college is focused on hosting a successful April conference. The event will include a banquette and a career fair focused on engineering trades. Contests in bridge building and concrete canoes will also take place.

"We're hoping to expose a lot of the community to the fact that we do have an engineering school at Carroll," said Fischer. "We're not well known for that, but I think our reputation is starting to grow."