SEAS offers new two-year master's degree for Computational Science and Engineering

Graduate students hoping to study Computational Science and Engineering may soon find a new home at Harvard. The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences announced on Friday that it will offer a two-year Master of Engineering in the field beginning in fall 2014.

Unlike the one-year Master of Science degree in CSE that the University began offering this fall, the two-year Master of Engineering degree will provide students with the opportunity to “build greater research and technical skills, apply computation to a domain of interest, and complete a substantial project with a research mentor,” according to a SEAS press release.

Students involved in the two-year program will be required to write a thesis, which Cristopher R. Cecka, a SEAS lecturer and researcher on applied computational science, said will be especially helpful for students who wish to pursue academia.

“A year of research gives you a lot of experience in developing solutions to problems that you wouldn’t encounter in just homework or something like that,” Cecka said. “Being immersed in the research for a year and having to write up and potentially publish your master’s thesis is something really important, not just for going into industry, but also for going back into academia.”

Cecka also said that students enrolled in the Master of Engineering program would have exposure to professors in related departments, who might recruit the students as Ph.D. candidates.

Meg Hastings, interim executive director of SEAS’s Institute for Applied Computational Science, emphasized the degree’s flexibility. The Institute’s courses, activities, and research opportunities will be featured in the new program.

“With any new program, there are a lot of opportunities, and we’re hoping to learn a lot from the students and the faculty to help us shape the program as we get it started,” Hastings said.

A survey conducted by Daniel S. Weinstock, SEAS’s assistant director of graduate studies in CSE, suggested that 10 of the 24 students currently enrolled in the Master of Science program would be interested in transferring to the second year of the Master of Engineering program at the end of the spring.

Despite the survey, Rosalind Reid—a fellow in computer science involved with developing the Master of Engineering—suggested some doubt that all 10 would enroll.

“This is an area where there is a tremendous amount of interest from employers and from industry and so some students who would like to do a second year will nevertheless be offered fantastic jobs and may make a decision to go into the job market,” Reid said.

While many of the disciplines taught at SEAS have Ph.D. programs, the computational science and engineering field has yet to develop one. Instead, SEAS remains focused on development of its two Masters programs, according to Hastings.

Reid said SEAS considers any potential creation of a Ph.D. program to be a five to 10 year process.

“You can’t say, specifically, we want to go fast or slow on the Ph.D.,” Reid said. “Before you have a Ph.D. program in place, you need to have sufficient faculty to advise the students, and you need to have an academic track that is available to these students if they wanted to go apply for faculty jobs.”

Reid acknowledged that other schools with larger faculties have been able to develop Ph.D. programs. Still, she stressed stressed Harvard’s advantages.

“Rather than growing it out of any existing department or a lot of faculty who are already here, we were able to take a fresh approach,” Reid said. “This is a program built on applied math, computer science, and now statistics at Harvard. We’re putting these together in a unique way, and I think that that is creating a program that is unparalleled anywhere else.”