Engineering students have the chance to make their voices heard this week, as the Student Engineers’ Council conducts its semesterly survey across the college.
The SEC’s Spring Engineering Survey aims to give students the opportunity to have a voice in the direction of the College of Engineering. The survey asks questions on engineering topics such as the 25-by-25 Initiative and how the college should spend differential tuition, and its results are presented to the administration at the end of every semester.
Andrew West, SEC president, said the survey is important because it gives students the opportunity to make sure the administration better listens to students, both current and future.
“If you have strong opinions about what is going on in the college, and you want to make it better for not only yourself, but also for the people coming after you, take the survey and provide your opinion,s because it is going directly to the people that make those decisions,” West said.
West said the survey covers a variety of topics, including the engineering college’s 25-by-25 Initiative — a plan to enroll 25,000 engineering students by 2025 — to how graduating students secure employment, the way the college spends differential tuition and the overall atmosphere of the engineering environment.
“We have tried to cover different topics on the survey like 25-by-25 or differential tuition essentially to get student opinion then relay that to the deans and the department heads to show them what the student opinion is and then allow them to make decisions based on those opinions,” West said.
Differential tuition is a significant part of the tuition that engineering students pay, and the survey asks what students believe this money should be spent on. West said in recent years, the student voice has been taken very seriously on this issue.
“For the last couple years, professors of practice have been a large percentage on the survey, and then we take that to differential tuition oversight meetings and explain that is what the students want, and for the last couple years that is where the majority of the money has gone,” West said. “So you can see a direct benefit of the survey there.”
Any students in the college are asked to reply because as the total response to the survey increases, the weight it carries grows as well.
“With any survey the university sends out, the response rate is usually relatively low,” West said. “We have grown our response rate in the past, but if more students respond and give their opinion, it just means that the deans and department heads will take it that much more seriously.”
The SEC Engineering Survey was sent to all engineering students’ A&M email addresses. It closes 11:59 p.m. Friday.
