Faculty Director’s Message
(6//2010)

We have completed our second year of T&M operations, and I continue to be impressed by the strong support we receive from Georgia Tech’s faculty and students, but especially from our corporate affiliates. Corporate affiliates are highly involved in T&M classes and outside-the-classroom activities. Executives have served as guest lecturers, challenging our students with debates about real world technology and business issues, and provided career advice during small social settings.

Most importantly, each corporate affiliate supplies a Capstone Project for our interdisciplinary student teams to complete during their final semester in the program. Our T&M class of 2010 was thoroughly engaged in capstone projects during the spring semester. Professor Blake Cherrington and I guided them as they navigated, tackled, and conquered the intriguing problems provided by our corporate affiliates. As our latest report on Capstone Projects indicates, our corporate affiliates tell us that they have found the program valuable and remain highly involved. We recently welcomed Newell Recycling, bringing the total of corporate affiliates to six and we continue to investigate opportunities, seeking to add two more qualified affiliates.

In January we raised the grade point average requirement for applying to the program to a 3.0 and still attracted a record 126 applicants (more than 50 percent over the previous year).  The quality of the students admitted to the T&M Class of 2012 is outstanding (average GPA of 3.63) and the diversity of disciplines is broad.

The T&M Class of 2011 is also a high performing group, with an average GPA of 3.48.  They have impressed our faculty and visiting executives with their insightful questions and high level of class participation. They will be excellent role models for the incoming class

I am looking forward to the next academic year and supervising our second year of T&M capstone projects.  Based on our students’ performance on their projects this past year, I fully expect the class of 2011 to do an equally impressive job and produce results that will significantly benefit our corporate affiliates.