“We will graduate 45 Ph.D.’s. For us that’s a pretty healthy number,” says Dahleh. “But you know places like Purdue will be graduating a lot more.”

But many people see potential in Harvard’s small size. “It’s interesting in that it’s a much smaller program, much newer, much faster growing, more nimble,” says Matthew W. Yarri ’14, who is considering the engineering concentration.

Harvard’s Wyss Institute has made bold strides as a flexible, inter-disciplinary center in helping to define the field of biological engineering, according to George M. Church, a professor of genetics and member of the affiliated faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

“There’s nothing really like it in the world,” he says.

Interdisciplinary work in research laboratories also parallels a growing emphasis on design-based curricula in undergraduate teaching laboratories.

“Historically [the curriculum] was very theoretical but now there’s a big shift to do the applied side of engineering,” says Daniel H. Nevius ’11, president of the Harvard College Engineering Society. He adds that a student “push for hands-on engineering” has met with enthusiasm from the faculty.

“We want students to be excited about what we have here,” says Anas Chalah, director of instructional laboratories at SEAS. “When [students] come to Harvard ... we want them to be pleasantly shocked. Our teaching labs are one little link in that big chain that will bring us to being number one in engineering.”

Chalah says that non-concentrators are also likely to benefit from the lab components in general education courses like ES1: “Introduction to Engineering Sciences” and ES50: “Introduction to Electrical Engineering.”

“Students from such divisions who didn’t care about engineering [now] become interested,” says Chalah, adding that this aspect of outreach makes the facilities part of SEAS’ educational mission to reach out to students from all disciplines.

“One of my goals is to have every student take an engineering course, something like [Computer Science 50] for example,” explains Murray. “It gets people aware of what engineering actually is. We have so much technology in our society it just gets an awareness that you too can write iPhone apps.”

FINDING SYNERGY

Murray hopes to reach around 600 SEAS concentrators—ten to fifteen percent of the undergraduate population—within the next ten years. If finances allow, she would also like to hire 30 new faculty members in the same time frame.

But Harvard is still far from comparing itself to its neighbor down Mass. Ave.

In the 2009-2010 school year, SEAS—which includes applied math, computer sciences, and engineering—had 415 undergraduate concentrators. By contrast, MIT had 1,977 engineering majors—which includes engineering and computer science—this school year.

With these numbers, MIT is able to offer resources that Harvard cannot provide.