EngD in Systems now an Engineering Council-accredited degree

In case you missed the announcement in August, we thought we'd highlight the news that the EngD in Systems, delivered by the IDC in Systems at the University of Bristol and the University of Bath, has been officially accredited as providing a pathway to Chartered Engineer (CEng) status by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) and the Institution of Civil engineers (ICE).

The industrial doctorate centre (IDC) for Systems is one of the first EngD centres to be recognised by the UK regulator, the Engineering Council, as providing a route to CEng registration for future leaders in industry and academia. Professor Patrick Godfrey, director of the centre and chairman of the Association of Engineering Doctorates' steering group, says:

"Accreditation is a mark of assurance that the degree meets the standards set by the Engineering Council in the UK Standard for Professional Engineering Competence (UK-SPEC). An accredited degree will provide you with some or all of the underpinning knowledge, understanding and skills for eventual registration as Chartered Engineer (CEng). Some employers recruit preferentially from accredited degrees, and an accredited degree is likely to be recognised by other countries that are signatories to international accords".

The decision was relayed to the IDC in Systems following a visit by the Engineering Accreditation Board (EAB) in November 2012.

AEngD website update

Regular visitors to the AEngD website may know that we have been experiencing sporadic problems with its performance, with some pages being slow to load, or sometimes not loading at all (we noted this in May too).

We are now undertaking a major overhaul. The site is to be moved to a new hosting provider, the supporting content management system will be updated, and - once the migration and update are tested and found to be working satisfactorily - we will be fixing various minor issues relating to how some information is currently processed and displayed.

In the meantime, there may be occasional outages as we undertake this work, for which we apologise in advance, and we will keep users updated via Twitter, Facebook and this blog.

Improving public awareness of STEM

Many EngD researchers contribute to efforts to promote uptake of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. Some initiatives are undertaken by industry sponsors; some are promoted by institutions - for example, the IET has supported events marking Ada Lovelace Day; and other STEM projects are undertaken by universities or by industrial doctorate centres (IDCs).

Sophie Causon-Wood of the IDC in Systems at University of Bristol has sent word of two great projects undertaken by EngD researchers this summer:

• The Systems Centre recently organised a two-day event in which students learned the skills of writing and creating a short film to communicate their research in an accessible way. The event was led by Kate Butler, a highly-experienced ex-BBC journalist and documentary producer. Read more about it here.
• The Centre also hosted two outreach sessions, welcoming local school students to the centre to introduce them to engineering and its flavour of systems thinking. Read more about it here.

For those of us engaged in research it is reminiscent of the Einstein quote: "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."

Let us know if you are engaged in any interesting STEM initiatives (and did you know the AEngD is currently running its own Engineering Research Writer of the Year Award to promote public understanding of EngD research projects?).

Understanding the EngD Impact - share your experiences!

A short-term pilot study, supported by the AEngD and EPSRC, aims to understand the various forms of impact which EngD programmes have made over years. The key objective is to define and understand what is the ‘impact’ of EngDs and identify how it can best be evidenced. Dr. Fumi Kitagawa, lecturer in enterprise studies at Manchester Business School is leading the project and has provided the following overview:

The focus of the study is on understanding the impact of the EngD, with specific focus on:

1. impact on industry partners providing some hard evidence of the value of EngD project sponsorship to industry, and
2. career pathways, identifying how the EngD experience shapes the career paths of Research Engineers/ EngD Alumni.

Rationale

Whilst benefits and strengths of EngD programmes are recognised over years and anecdotally acknowledged, there is a need to provide frameworks that answer the question – “What is the nature of EngD Impact?”, and then demonstrate the extent of such impact by identify tangible data-sets and evidences. This is a pertinent question to ask after 20 years since the Parnaby report was published, by examining the accumulated impact of the EngD. Demonstrating the impact is imperative for the future of the EngD programmes and the future of doctoral training that is relevant to industry and societal needs, especially in times of austerity.

Help needed

This pilot study is being conducted by a small research team at Manchester Business School. We are conducting telephone interviews in July 2013 (interview duration about half an hour). We would like to talk to RE Alumni, and key industry partners with various EngD experiences, illustrating different impacts from the EngD programmes. In order to complete this study, the support of the IDCs/EngD Centres is essential. It would be extremely helpful if the AEngD member Centres could give contacts of alumni and industry partners. We are looking for 2-3 alumni and key industry contacts from individual Centres.

Thanks for your kind attention and co-operation in advance. Please get in touch for any queries and suggestions. You can email me at Fumi.kitagawa@mbs.ac.uk.

More EngD bloggers and websites

The AEngD steering committee met yesterday at Reading University and during a discussion of various aspects of the web, PR man Paul Wilkinson highlighted the launch of this blog and its 'blog-roll' feature.

Since that meeting, a few more blogs have been identified. For example, Paul Jeffrey of the STREAM IDC sent details of three water-related sites:

• Jo-fai Chow's 'Blend it like a Bayesian!'
• Jack Bloodworth's 'Catchment Jack'
• Ben Ward's Integrated Infrastructure ​Asset Management

(Ben's isn't, strictly, a blog - Wix sites are more websites than blogs and so don't have the RSS update capabilities of blogs. Updates won't appear in the listing, but it's well worth a look.)

If you have a blog related to your EngD research, please let us know and we can share it with other people in the EngD community.

VEIV EngD centre hosts building projection party

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  The EngD Centre in Virtual Environments, Imaging & Visualisation welcomes you for drinks at its exhibition and book launch in the UCL Quad where it will be projecting 10 years of research onto the face of the Portico and Wilkins Building. 
  Date:   Friday 14th June 2013
  Exhibition Opens:  8.00pm
  Speech:   9.30pm
  Building Projection:  10.00pm
  Location:  UCL Quad, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
  The VEIV centre is involved in the research of virtual environments and interactivity of everything from architecture to archiving. For more information on the exhibition and the VEIV centre, please visit: http://engdveiv.ucl.ac.uk/
  Please sign up for free at our eventbrite page if you are able to make it: http://uclveiv10years.eventbrite.com/

Website issue

Our web host has alerted us: "SRV19 is currently under a huge DDoS attack and is therefore offline." In short, this means the server hosting the AEngD website is temporarily unavailable. We are monitoring the situation with the webhost and will post further updates via Twitter and our Facebook page.

Update (1830hrs) - The website is now back up again, having been down for approximately 140 mins. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Longer term, we will also be looking to review our hosting. There have been sporadic issues with page download speeds (the vacancies section can be verrrrry slowwwwww!) with pages occasionally timing out. Hopefully, once normal service has been resumed at our host, we can then discuss changes to our hosting regime.