Engineering students and students from other disciplines may have more options for engineering minors this fall, pending approval from the College of Engineering faculty and the university administration.

Both minors — engineering studies and bioengineering — will be available for students to better understand growing technology advancements.

“If implemented, the proposed minor in engineering studies would be designed for students who are not engineering majors,” said Alan Russell, professor of materials science and engineering. “The minor in bioengineering would be structured to serve primarily engineering students, although some non-engineering students may also be interested in the program.”

Courses will be structured so that non-engineering students can learn more about engineering in order to make them more effective in their career, Russell said.

“It is not intended to make the students into practicing engineers,” he said.

Biology and artificial systems are overlapping more and more, Russell said, and a minor in bioengineering could serve to better prepare students to operate in both realms.

“The concept of offering non-engineering students with the topics covered in the minor in engineering studies is a new idea,” he said. “Only one other university in the United States has such a program, Lehigh University, and that program is only 10 months old.”

Both of these minors would require additional resources, but few, if any, new faculty or staff members, Russell said.

“In the long term, the university would provide sustaining support for these programs, ideally from additional tuition revenue available from the greater numbers of students who will be attracted by these programs to enroll at Iowa State,” he said.

For the engineering studies minor, students would have to take three required courses — basic engineering, environmental effects of engineering activity and engineering products — totaling nine credits. They would also have to take 12 more credits from a group of 16 other courses containing various aspects of engineering to achieve the minimum credit requirement of 21 credits.

Required courses and several of the elective courses will be structured so that students do not need high-level math and science prerequisites, Russell said.

Although, some of the elective courses will require more rigorous math and science preparation, it makes the minors accessible to students in programs that are not usually thought of as being technology-oriented, such as chemistry, physics or mathematics.

The bioengineering minor has not been developed in as much detail, but it would provide students with broader educational and career opportunities through a program that combines engineering and biological sciences.

“We want to make sure the minor gives the student a broad understanding of engineering,” said Jan Putnam, student services specialist for engineering undergraduate programs.

Putnam said the goal of these minors is to help students in non-engineering disciplines understand how engineering helps their world.

“A student might want to pursue an engineering minor even if they left the major,” she said. “They could continue taking a minor, but it would depend on how many engineering courses they had completed and what they were in order for them to count.”

During the 2003-04 fiscal year, almost 22 percent of students were engineering undergraduates, according to the ISU Fact Book.

“One of the things that kept me at Iowa State was the amount of opportunities that the university presents its students,” said Nate Evans, senior in computer engineering.