Provost approves name change to Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
With overwhelming support from faculty and students, the department has been approved for a name change from Department of Electrical Engineering to Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The name change more appropriately describes the subject matters of interest to our faculty and the degree programs of our students, which include the Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering. The name change does not involve any modifications to the degree requirements for our undergraduate and graduate programs. The degrees will remain the same -- either Electrical Engineering (for BS, MS, and PhD) or Computer Engineering (for BS).
For most of its history, the Department had only one baccalaureate degree program: the BS Electrical Engineering, with three tracks in computers, electrophysics, and systems. In 2010, the computer track transitioned into the BS Computer Engineering program and soon became the College of Engineering’s most rapidly growing degree program. In 2016, ABET retroactively accredited the BS Computer Engineering degree program. A considerable percentage of our Department’s Outstanding Graduating Seniors has in fact been computer engineering majors, and several have secured jobs at companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
Given the department’s two baccalaureate degree programs, its strong focus on cybersecurity, ubiquitous computing, machine learning, and data science, we believe we have a strong case for renaming our department as the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.