Business Skills for Engineers

ENGRC 335
Communications for Engineering Managers
This seminar focuses on communications in organizational contexts common to engineering graduates. Topics may include internal and external communications; balancing visual and verbal elements in documents and oral presentations; teamwork and leadership; running and attending meetings; management strategies; and communicating with colleagues, superiors, subordinates, and clients. Students develop writing and management strategies that they apply in individual and team assignments. They learn how to organize technical and managerial information, articulate and support ideas, and communicate with technical and nontechnical audiences.

ENGRG 235
Career Development for Engineering
Introduces concepts and techniques that can be used now and in the future to set appropriate personal and professional career goals.

ENGRG 461, M&AE 461, OR&IE 452
Entrepreneurship for Entrepreneurs
Develops skills necessary to identify, evaluate, and begin new business ventures. Topics include intellectual property, competition, strategy, business plans, technology forecasting, finance and accounting, and sources of capital. A rigorous, quantitative approach is stressed throughout, and students create financial documents and plans, analyze human resource models, and work with sophisticated valuation methods, complicated equity structures, and legal and business documents. As such, this course represents the “red meat” of entrepreneurship, and the soft skills are left for other courses. Course work consists of discussions, assignments, and the preparation and presentation of a complete business plan.

ENGRI 127, M&AE 127
Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Engineering
Provides a solid introduction to the entrepreneurial process to students in engineering. The main objective is to identify and to begin to develop skills in the engineering work that occurs in high-growth, high-tech ventures. Basic engineering management issues, including the entrepreneurial perspective, opportunity recognition and evaluation, and gathering and managing resources are covered. Technical topics such as the engineering design process, product realization, and technology forecasting are discussed.

BEE 489
Engineering Entrepreneurship, Management, and Ethics        
The course focuses on how to start a new company centered on engineering or biological technologies. Course objectives include coverage of: entrepreneurship principles, fund raising, negotiation, financial calculations (internal rate of return, time value of money, proforma statements); legal structures of businesses; project management; and to develop an awareness of issues related to professional ethics; and technical writing and communication. Majority of work done in teams including a complete business plan that is presented to angel investors. Business plans must require less than $100K in startup funding and may result in actual investment by the angel investor group.

BEE 533
Engineering Professionalism
This course provides a review of an engineer’s professional responsibilities for the health and welfare of the public and discusses pertinent management principles for a professional engineer. Case histories on engineering ethics will be reviewed. Students are required to write their own personal statement on integrity. Approximately half of the class time will be dedicated to review materials associated with the NY Fundamentals of Engineering exam. Significant out-of-class time will be required to successfully pass the FE exam.

CEE 593
Engineering Management Methods
Methods for managing data and transforming data into information. Modeling as a means to synthesize information into knowledge that can form the basis for decisions and actions. Application of statistical methods and optimization to managerial problems in project design, scheduling, operations, forecasting, and resource allocation.

CEE 594
Economic Methods for Engineering and Management
Introduces economic concepts and uses them to select, calibrate and apply proper analytic decision tools in engineering design and management. Topics include market analysis and pricing strategies; production choices and cost estimation; input acquisition and employee motivation; project evaluation and the cost of capital; decision-making in risky and uncertain environments; industry structure, bidding strategies and game theory; plus the regulatory and ethical consequences of overall managerial strategies.

CEE 690
Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership
Graduate course designed to help aspiring engineering managers to better understand individual creativity and organizational innovation and to develop the required skills to play a productive role in fostering both. Not incidentally, the course will also help students who take it to become more creative themselves. The course is highly participative and has a flow that moves from the individual-—to the group-—to the organization, with theory, research results, and practical skillsdevelopment woven seamlessly together.

OR&IE 453
Revenue Management
Covers revenue management concepts, models used in practice, and possible extensions; forecasting techniques, including time series methods, booking curves, and customer preference models; demand uncensoring; overbooking and optimization with emphasis on stochastic models of demand, benefit measurement; computational and technological issues; bid-prices and dynamic programming techniques; examples from the airlines, hotels, car-rental agencies, restaurants, and other industries.

OR&IE 893-894
Enterprise Engineering Colloquium
Weekly meeting for master of engineering students. Discussion with industry speakers and faculty members on the uses of engineering in the economic design, manufacturing, marketing,and distribution and goods and services.

BEE 687
The Science and Engineering Challenges to the Development of Sustainable Bio-Based Industries
Environmentally sustainable alternatives for our energy and chemical needs are critical. This seminar series explores challenges facing the development of industries that use biologically derived materials to produce useful chemicals and energy for society. Topics include natural products from biological systems, conversion of biomass to fuel and other commodities, and the use of biological systems for environmental bioremediation.