We are excited to announce that, as part of our branding efforts and in celebration of our department’s 100th anniversary this year, we are henceforth changing our department’s name to better represent our ongoing role at North Carolina State University and across the country. Effective today, April 1, 2017, we have renamed to be the Department of Cool Stuff Engineering.
We retain our position within the College of Engineering and continue our academic and research focus on electrical and computer engineering, but recognize that our work goes far beyond simple volts and circuits, but rather puts the cool in everyday stuff.
“Think of the coolest technologies in your life–things like the iPhone, Fitbit, Tesla, Xbox, solar panels, and the smart home,” elaborates Dr. Daniel Stancil, Head of the Department. “These are all enabled by devices, circuits, sensors, embedded systems, wireless and wired computer networks, and data centers for the cloud that were conceived, designed, and built by Electrical and Computer Engineers.”
The move to change the name reflects the evolution of the discipline, as several preceding name changes have also done.
In the early years of NC State University (known as the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts), one of the first departments on campus was Physics and Electrical Engineering, founded in 1894, predating the College of Engineering itself. Following the growth of the field, the two subjects became separate, resulting in the creation of the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1917. As the innovations by electrical engineers continued over the ensuing decades, the birth of the modern-day computer resulted in the department renaming in 1981 to the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Now, 36-years later, we continue in that stride of truly representing what we do and who we are as the Department of Cool Stuff Engineering.
Watch the video announcement from Dr. Daniel Stancil.
April 3, 2017 Update
As you may have noticed over the past couple days, our department, in the spirit of April Fools, temporarily changed its name to the Department of Cool Stuff Engineering. While in jest, the sentiment itself is very real.
For more-than a century, we’ve been breaking ground as electrical and computer engineers, bringing life to ideas from all disciplines, and fostering innovation to improve civilization.
While we bring attention to our technological strides in healthcare, power, transportation, and security, we must also focus on the amazing and truly cool things that we as electrical and computer engineers bring to our everyday world. We don’t simply dream in abstract, but rather create the incredible – embracing electricity and microchips to positively transform our world from the home to the road, from the oceans to outer-space, from our everyday devices to a lasting power-grid.
We must praise the coolness of our accomplishments, and trumpet the cross-disciplinary relationships of everything we do. We need to ensure the recognition that without electrical and computer engineers, robots would never move, planes could not start, and our modern connected world would never exist.
We don’t just tinker with electricity and computers, we make our world possible by creating and doing cool stuff. So while our name may not have actually changed, our reality continues to show that our department has really been doing cool stuff for over a hundred years.