Students have to design either an assembly or a mechanism completely in 3D with a parametric modeller. The two new CAD Application courses are run in the second year and are intended to be flexible to accommodate last minute upgrades and new 'hot' software. It offers a one-week orientation with hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders, bearings, seals and other mechanical items that students are expected to work with and design in upper year courses. Muench proudly reports that about one third of the students are female. The program approach is to cover the traditional methods of engineering and or mechanical design and then as soon as possible move on to applying computers to the manual calculations.
Students get the basic theory up front and then work with computer solutions.
A CAD systems management course teaches them about servers, engineering document management and project management. In a hardware course, they strip down a computer and learn the computer components. The program's graduates are often regarded as their employer's resident computer expert and have been migrating into CAD systems management jobs within companies. The former covers the entire design cycle from start to finish. Students are assigned a project, usually based on the Society of Automotive Engineers' design competition.