Engineering Websites of three Colleges

.....doubt, I would think, between the two of us that Tulane University is a great institution that has proven time and time again how elite and adept it is at developing and teaching the leaders and workers of tomorrow. Whether it be engineers, scientists, mathematicians or other people that enter and then work in the STEM space, our curriculum is certainly better than most.

Even with that, it is important to compare, consider and contrast how we present ourselves on the Tulane website and how this compares to universities of similar size and scope. We must always make sure that the online "face" we present is accurate, complete and contemporary. Beyond that, it must compare favorably to the colleges that we directly compete with for the best and brightest students.

For the purposes of this brief letter, the colleges that will be compared and contrasted are our own (University of Tulsa), Tulane Rice and Wake Forest. Of course, these colleges are similar in size and type and thus the comparison among the three should be favorable and positive in nature. Before we get to the external colleges, we shall look at our own. The easy and obvious to see feature of the Engineering page for Tulsa is the photo montage that rotates after the homepage is loaded.

There are the common menu bars at the top, both within the engineering realm (the blue bar) and the broader campus (the gold bar). There is a relative simplicity to the rest as there are links to events on the calendar, two examples of students doing real-world work that is impactful and then the campus visit, advising and continuing education links at the bottom. Tulane has a dedicated front page that is for the School of Science and Engineering.

There is the customary menu bar along the top that gives links to information about the program including the academics involved, the faculty and staff such as ourselves, the research that the program does, the alumni that have come and gone already, the giving that we all do, our outreach, news that is going on and events that are going to be happening in the coming days, weeks and months.

As of this moment, the body of the Tulane page includes congratulations to the recent graduating class of 2017, the movement to treat troubled children as "sad, not bad" and a few other items such as a physics focus and the graduate research about cancer that our own Madeline Sell has been working on. The page is decent but has nothing that "wows" or stands out as compared to our own. In looking at the Rice page for their equivalent school, that being the George R.

Brown School of Engineering, there are similarities but there are also clear differences. The menu bar is something that is obviously and expectedly there. However, the page is much more "stretched" in nature. There is a huge image that takes up the bulk of the first page to load and it takes an amount of scrolling to see the rest of what is there. Beyond that, the links and things there are similar, but with two key differences.

First, there is a "Resources" bar at the top, above everything else, that links to resources for undergraduates, graduates, parents and faculty. Tulane should add something like that because it is clearly not linked on the main page. This should obviously correlate to the physical operations of the admissions office and the Engineering School in particular.

Another thing that is present that Tulane should use is that there is a quick bar of statistics that show what makes Rice elite including the amount of research, how many people they enroll and the quality of the faculty. This should be part of the online and ground-based operations of Tulane, to be sure. We have to tell kids and parents why we are a good school. Finally, there are some quick observations from the Wake Forest engineering school.

Their engineering website is rather segmented and perhaps inferior to our own, but one thing that they do that is important is that one of their founding members is a female. While making it a point to focus.