Departmental Goals

The above mission will be achieved through innovative education, research, and public engagement to improve the quality of life in the Sultanate by:

1. Providing the excellent and broad education necessary to prepare our graduates to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

2. Achieving and sustaining an intellectually diverse environment that fosters innovative research and education to solve society's most critical problems.

3. Fulfilling the unmet need for technically educated leadership to improve and shape public policy at local and national levels.

4. Embracing and leveraging globalization to advance engineering and the impact of technology on economic vitality.

5. Assessing progress based upon the excellence and impact of our scholarship and teaching.

6. Partnering with and increasing the return on investment of our stakeholders through a highly educated and valued workforce and improved economic vitality of the country.

7. To achieve such goals, the Department of Engineering set Human Capital and Education as its two main priorities.

Priorities: Education

Our most valuable assets are the members of our extended community, including prospective students, our alumni, students, faculty and staff, industrial collaborators, and government partners. Enabling our constituents to be successful in their careers and pursuits creates a sense of ownership in the Department of Engineering that best serves those constituents and empowers the Department to fulfill its mission.

1. Supporting an intellectually diverse environment will broadly stimulate excellence and enable all members of our community to pursue their scholarship in the manner that can best serve our mission.

2. Our faculty, staff, students, and graduates will serve honestly and ethically, constantly seeking ways to use their knowledge and experience to improve the society.

3. The Department of Engineering will provide an excellent education coupled with experiential learning that recognizes the global leveling of the engineering profession and the rapid pace of innovation. This will be accomplished by providing choice, breadth, and accelerated pace in curricula.

4. We will empower our students to customize their educations to achieve their career goals. We will recognize that future opportunities will involve expertise in systems in all engineering disciplines. We will enable an engineering education to be an ideal entry point to all careers. We will provide our students with accredited academic programs to enable them to further their careers and education.

5. To prepare our graduates to become leaders in a profession dominated by globalization, our students will have increasing opportunities for international experiences. New resources will be devoted to improving the quality and uniqueness of instruction and lowering student-to-faculty ratios to enable more engagement. Such resources include recruiting sufficient and qualified faculty for the delivery of programs in the Department.

Desired Program Outcomes

Despite its challenges, the Department aims to provide engineering education that seeks to develop a capacity for objective analysis, synthesis, and design to obtain a practical solution. The programs at the Department of Engineering are designed to develop the professional competence of a diverse student body and, by breadth of study, to prepare students to solve the technical problems of society while considering the ethical, social, and economic implications of their work. Each of the engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have:

1. an ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering

2. an ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data

3. an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability

4. an ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams

5. an ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems

6. an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility

7. an ability to communicate effectively

8. the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context

9. a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning

10. a knowledge of contemporary issues

11. an ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice.