<p>I want to go to grad school to obtain my masters in either Electrical or Mechanical Engineering. Getting my MS online would definitely be more convenient but is it too hard to do for a field like Engineering.</p>
<p>I guess i'm just wondering how much an engineering masters program involves hands on work or is the majority of the work just tests and papers?</p>
<p>Also, Would an online MS program look bad to employers?</p>
<p>A professional Masters degree is all coursework and can be done online. The important thing is to determine if there is any difference between the degree that you get in the online program and the one you would get if you were on campus.</p>
<p>at my university, Illinois Tech, we have a number of Masters programs which are offered online and are identical for both live and distance-learning students. We do this by lecture-capture and posting within 24 hours. Exams are handled by local proctors. The diplomas are all the same.</p>
<p>Agreed with Xray above.
Son just started an online/distance learning program at Georgia Tech. The classed he streams online are made during the actual professor lectures. He has his supervisor at work proctor tests. He never has to go to campus, which is good as he is states away! He is taking it slowly as he is working full time. He applies to 2 other highly ranked programs (accepted at all). USNWR ranks Masters of Mechanical Engineering programs as well as the distance learning program for this major. </p>
<p>Sons degree will be identical to those in the program on campus though it is not that way at every school.</p>
<p>It sounds like programs would be identical to the lecture-centric campus classes. </p>
<p>But it would be different (and OK in most cases I think) from the typical programs I’ve heard about that have intense, research-based thesis. </p>
<p>Absolutely, a research intensive, thesis-based program is quite different. It is likely that some of the lecture courses would be the same but a thesis might take one or even two semesters longer since research is one of those things you cannot predict the outcome of.</p>
<p>A lot of “professional” graduate engineering degrees aren’t that heavy on research. They tend to be very practical, and often don’t require any kind of thesis. I didn’t have to do a thesis for my IE graduate degree.</p>
<p>I find it amusing that you cite professional degrees being “practical” as a way in which they are different than thesis-based degrees. If anything, it’s thenother way around, as thesis-based degrees require research, and research typically involves a whole lot more hands-on work on real problems than does coursework.</p>
<p>Literally the only advantage of coursework-only degrees is that they can be done fairly easily while working full time, while a thesis would be difficult to do while working as it is essentially its own full-time job.</p>
<p>In my opinion, of course.</p>
<p>I saw my sons spread sheet with 7-8 colleges he was considering form grad school (distance learning as I stated above). I remember seeing a column for thesis required (or not), number of credits, etc… Some schools have thesis program and non-thesis available. </p>
<p>Most graduate research is too narrowly-focused, arcane, and unmonetizable to be of interest to companies in the real world. That’s why companies are happy (or at least willing) to pay tuition for professional graduate programs that are tailored to practical business concerns,</p>
<p>Research may be the be-all and end-all for those on college campuses, but that’s not the case for businesses.</p>
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<p>You aren’t familiar with what research is performed in engineering, are you? A large amount of graduate research is funded by industry. The reason they leave it to universities is that it is often a problem a company wants to address but would not make economic sense to invest the capital of development of their own capabilities for something that they only need to do a handful of times or else because they value the training it provides students who they can then hire.</p>
<p>Even much of the more theoretical research in engineering is grounded in a practical problem. For example, the research group of which I am a part is a fairly theory-heavy branch of aeronautics and a lot of times it boils down to researching a specific phenomenon in the region of air within a few millimeters of a wing surface. I bet that sounds pretty esoteric to you, yet we get a ton of money from the big airframers and have essentially a direct line feeding students frequently into one of the big three aerospace defense contractors. The reason is that not only is the seemingly narrow problem hugely important when you understand the big picture (it is directly related to drag on the airframe and fuel consumption), but the techniques you use to study such phenomena (whether computational or experimental) are directly applicable to a bunch of other problems that the companies also have to solve, especially for those trying to get into an R&D department inside said companies.</p>
<p>Similar patterns are true of many, many other engineering research groups. I am not sure where you are getting your information, but you are quite a way off base.</p>
<p>Companies are perfectly happy to pay tuition for professional graduate programs because it is still further education, said degrees still have plenty of value, and they get to keep their workers at work essentially full-time working the problem they were hired to work while the go to school.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if you already have a job, a large portion of the time a professional, coursework-only degree is more than sufficient. If you are trying to make yourself more marketable to get certain types of jobs, particularly of the R&D type, then the thesis-based degree offers advantages.</p>
<p>In short, research is certainly not the end-all-be-all in its own right, but if the professor running the research group is a good one, the students come out of those research programs with highly marketable skills they wouldn’t have obtained from coursework alone, and these skills can be especially applicable for certain types of jobs within said companies.</p>