The School
SEAS is one of 10 schools and colleges at the University of Virginia. It is the second-largest school at U.Va. and is home to 1,993 undergraduates and 654 graduate students. Twenty-six percent of its undergraduates are women, and 24 percent are minorities. For the class of 2008, the average SAT score of matriculating students was 1353 out of a possible 1600; 76 percent graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. Forty percent of SEAS students pursue a minor; 10 percent choose economics as a minor.
In 2005, engineering students placed first in Phase One of a national competition for computer chip design. The team bested teams from 27 other universities. U.Va.'s entry, "An SRAD Image Processor as a Reconfigurable, Temperature-Aware SoC Designed for Low-Power Operation", won a small cash prize for the school. The contest was sponsored by the semiconductor industry to improve the design of integrated computer circuits.
The Aerospace Engineering fourth-year class entered and won the 2005 NASA Vehicle Systems Student Design Competition with their unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Mars flyer design. They received a small cash prize for the Aerospace Engineering Department, as well as the opportunity to present their design at an industry conference held in Columbus, Ohio during the summer of 2005.
Also in the summer of 2005, an undergraduate SEAS student drove 13,000 miles round-trip from Virginia to Alaska in a vegetable oil powered 1976 Mercedes 240D. For the year, the school was awarded $50 million in new research contracts by the United States government.
In November 2006, a new academic building, Wilsdorf Hall, was dedicated. The new structure is for collaborative research in materials science and materials engineering, chemical engineering, and nanotechnology. It also features a snack bar and coffee shop with an associated student lounge.
In March 2009, the school received a $10 million grant from NASA and the United States Air Force to develop the engines of new hypersonic aircraft that could fly at Mach 12 and at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet. Other aspects of the craft will be designed by two other centers receiving similar grants at Texas A&M and Teledyne.
Read more about this topic: University Of Virginia School Of Engineering And Applied Science
Famous quotes containing the words the school and/or school:
“... the school should be an appendage of the family state, and modeled on its primary principle, which is, to train the ignorant and weak by self-sacrificing labor and love; and to bestow the most on the weakest, the most undeveloped, and the most sinful.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.... No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1907–1960)
“Dad, if you really want to know what happened in school, then you’ve got to know exactly who’s in the class, who rides the bus, what project they’re working on in science, and how your child felt that morning.... Without these facts at your fingertips, all you can really think to say is “So how was school today?” And you’ve got to be prepared for the inevitable answer—”Fine.” Which will probably leave you wishing that you’d never asked.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)