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

• 

  
  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.

To RE or not to RE?

An email from Dr Andrea Haworth, Centre Manager at the Industrial Doctorate Centre in Machining Science (University of Sheffield) has got people talking about "how IDCs refer to EngD students/Research Engineers (and perhaps more importantly how EngDs refer to themselves)."

We appreciate that there is good reason and a strong steer to call them “Research Engineers”, but many people have a job title “Research Engineer” and aren’t EngD candidates. 

I really do try, but if I refer to  “Research Engineers”, most people don’t know that I’m talking about, or might, at best, assume that I mean someone who has gained the EngD qualification.

I tend to alternate between “EngD student” (which I don’t like but which is sort of understood) or ”EngD Research Engineer”, or as a complete get out, just “EngD”.  On business cards the students are referred to Research Engineer/ EngD Candidate or similar.

I was wondering whether “Postgraduate Research Engineer” might do (cf “Postgraduate Research Student”).  Or have I just invented something else to confuse? How do other IDCs handle this? 

Responses

• Sally Hawthorne at Southampton's IDC on transport and the environment said: "the students themselves wish to be known as ’EngD researchers’ and that’s what’s on their door signs and on their business cards."
• From the Manufacturing Technology centre at Nottingham, David Shipley said: "We tend to call ours Research Engineers or EngD Research Engineers. They seem to appreciate not being referred to as students externally. ... Ours tend to have Research Engineers on their business cards."
• Steven Yeomans (Loughborough's CICE) also said: "I use Research Engineer when dealing with anyone other than internal university systems, where I then use the term EngD student."
• David Stanley (Nuclear Engineering IDC) adopts the same approach: "externally we try to use 'Research Engineers' as much as possible and we also get them to put this on business cards. It adds a bit of kudos at conferences etc."
• Justine Easten from STREAM's Newcastle location, says: "I use EngD Research Engineers, and our researchers have business cards to say this, followed by their industrial sponsors name...."

The AEngD has tended to use 'Research Engineer' too, but what do you think? If you are engaged in an EngD programme, what title do you prefer?

Engineer yourself a lucrative career

"i-Education", within the Independent newspaper's succinct sister edition, yesterday (4 April 2013) had a feature on the demand for technical qualifications. Journalist Amy McLellan reported:

One increasingly popular alternative to the PhD, yet carrying the same academic weight, is the Engineering Doctorate. The qualification was launched in 1992 and it's thought around 2000 have either gained an EngD or are in the process of studying at one of 29 Industrial Doctorate Centres. Each has its own speciality, from formulation engineering at the University of Birmingham, to nanomaterials at Surrey or nuclear engineering at Imperial or Manchester.

"There is feedback from industry that they value the EngD very highly," says a spokesman for the Association of Engineering Doctorates. With a programme described as a four-year interview, research engineers spend 70 to 80 per cent of their time working on a research project for companies. "It fits them well for their future and the outputs from the research are not just valuable in terms of career advancement but also in terms of developing products, processes and intellectual property," says the spokesman. "It's very satisfying."

How many EngDs?

We were contacted last week by a journalist who wanted some basic background about the EngD qualification ("when was the qualification launched, how many people are studying for them (or have already qualified), how many IDC specialist centres are there...").

When and where?

The first question was easy. The EngD was launched in 1992 - in fact, the AEngD launch last November marked the 20th anniversary of the qualification - though the infrastructure of research centres took a while to establish.

The third question wasn't too hard either. There are currently around 28 or 29 UK industrial doctorate centres. Why "around"? Well, one centre at Oxford University does things differently and awards a DPhil instead of an EngD, so we think it's 29 in total, with 28 IDCs delivering EngD graduates.

How many?

The second question, though, was perhaps the hardest to answer accurately.

We know from the EPSRC's own review in March 2007 that "some 1230" Research Engineers (REs) had been enrolled (sponsored by over 510 different companies), but more up-to-date information isn't easily available.

We can't just extrapolate forward from 2007, as the number of IDCs soon grew from the initial five, with five added in 1997, and more in 2001 and 2006. By 2007, there were 22 IDCs, and the EngD landscape has continued to grow and constantly change, with REs being recruited throughout the year, not just for autumn admission. Also, enrolment figures may over-estimate the number of completed EngDs; we need to account for attrition (REs who, for whatever reason, don't complete their research) before we can give an accurate estimate of the number of EngDs awarded.

When EPSRC chairman Paul Golby (right) spoke at the AEngD launch he said approximately 1400 EngD students had been trained (presentation available here). Total EngD enrolments will be higher than this, of course: scores of REs are currently engaged on their research, and others will have dropped out. Could total enrolments now be around the 2000 mark?

The AEngD and EPSRC are undertaking some research (with Manchester Business School) to look at the impacts of the EngD programme and from this we hope to get a more accurate picture of the overall success of the qualification.

Meanwhile, some centres are approaching significant landmarks. We understand the Manchester-based Nuclear Engineering IDC, founded in 1992, originally more focused on manufacturing, now more specialised, and spanning eight institutions, is now approaching its 200th graduate. More recently-formed IDCs - such as Reading's TSBE - will deliver their first EngD graduates in 2013, while others, newer still, are just recruiting their first cohort.