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Show Summary

Are you an engineer who wants to use your technical skills and move into an entrepreneurial or managerial role? Well, Duke’s Master of Engineering Management or MEM may be just the ticket for you, and it provides two options, on campus and online. The program has been around for over 25 years and aims to prepare engineers with business knowledge. Luis Morales, Executive Director of the program, shares more of what the program offers and how applicants can successfully present themselves.  

Show Notes

Welcome to the 564th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Before we dive into today’s interview, I want to mention a free resource at Accepted that can benefit you if you are applying to graduate engineering programs and that is Applying to Graduate Engineering Programs: What You Need to Know. It can guide you through a process you’ve never been through before. It’s not the same as applying to college. Download your complimentary copy at accepted.com/564download. 

Our guest today is Luis Morales, Executive Director of the Master of Engineering Management Program at Duke University. Professor Morales earned his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico and his master’s of engineering from Cornell University. He then worked as an engineer and manager at AT&T and at Cisco before joining Duke as an executive in residence and adjunct associate professor at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, while also founding his own consulting company. He became the executive director of the MEM program in 2021 and also teaches three courses in that program.

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Professor Morales, welcome to Admissions Straight Talk. [2:00 ]

Thank you, Linda. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Can we start with an overview of the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke? Who is it for? What need is it intended to fill? [2:06 ]

Absolutely. So the Duke MEM program has been around for more than 25 years. In fact, last year we were celebrating our 25th year anniversary, and as I look back at the charter of the program back then in 1997, the purpose was to prepare engineers with business knowledge. So the assessment, Linda, at the time was that we were preparing engineers for industry, for the global economy that did not have the necessary business knowledge. So they were not able to either get an impact, have an impact on the business side of companies right away so that’s exactly the need that we’re trying to satisfy.

And if you think back to if that was the need then, and you look at where we are now as technology has become so pervasive across so much of how we as a society generate value, engineering management, to me is the perfect solution because it combines, again, it builds on a base of technical knowledge, but then it builds business knowledge on top of that. So the basic structure of the program is eight courses, four of which are core, focus on management, people management, intellectual property management, marketing and finance. Then the other four are technical electives designed to basically sharpen your STEM, saw, whether it is product management, data science, software management, et cetera.

There are two versions of the MEM program. There’s the online and the in-residence. Can you go over how they’re structured? [4:40 ]

Absolutely. So the campus program, as I mentioned before, has been around for more than 25 years. Our online offering is going to be 15 years in September. Yeah, the time flies. There are a lot of similarities between the two in terms of courses. The curriculum is the same, core courses, four electives, with some small exceptions, but the same instructors teach the core courses, teach the online sections. But then for the online course, Linda, what we do is that we replace the seminars and workshops that are included in the campus offering and we replace those with three weeks of residency where online students get to come to campus and then do their workshops, meet the faculty, and more importantly meet each other, meet fellow cohorts. So we do that before they begin their first semester. We do that halfway at the end of the first year of academic studies and then right before graduation. So those are the residency experiences.

Are there three residency experiences? [6:07 ]

That’s right.

How long are they? [6:10 ]

It’s one week. I know we’re not supposed to be sharing secrets here, but they’re one of the things that I consider to be the secret of success for our online program is precisely those residencies. We are lucky to have a professor who runs those residencies, La Tondra Murray, who is outstanding, and I think that helps keep the energy up during the residencies and after.

May I ask how many students are in each program and during the residencies? Do the in-residence and the online students get together? [6:51 ]

So the residencies, the way we design it is for the third residency, the one right before graduation, that’s the only one where there is actually an overlap between when the campus students are here and the online students are here. For the other residencies, they happen during the summer. One is in July and the other one is in early August. So by design, there are very small sections. There’s very little structural overlap between the two. Initially we were mixing it up, but we learned that their profiles are different. So our online students obviously are working professionals. They tend to join us, I don’t know, 5, 6, 8 years after graduation from undergrad. Whereas our campus students tend to join us on average three years after graduation. So there’s a significant difference in maturity. So we keep the two communities separate.

Do you have people in the in-residence program that are coming straight from college or do they usually work for a little bit? [8:11 ]

If we look at the distribution, I think there are three years, but students are allowed to join the campus program. They meet our admission requirements and we feel, Linda, if we were to change the program so that this only is dominated by fresh graduates, I think that we would be losing value if we were to do that.

So most of them have already worked a little bit. [8:48 ]

Yeah, most of them. In fact, this is admission season, so we just had our first deadline on Monday of this week. And if you look at the applications at random, then you just say, “Okay, what is the story? Why Duke? Why now?” And it’s very consistent. Engineers graduated with mechanical engineering degree or what have you. They went on and started working in a company and then all of a sudden they saw someone in their space tha