Sloan Foundation Awards Grant To TMS For A Career Resource Center

In October, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded TMS a $441,550 grant for the development of a career resource center for materials science and engineering. The career center has also received a commitment for financial support from the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME).

The TMS Career Resource Center will satisfy a need to provide not only information regarding the range of careers available in the field of materials science and engineering, but a general awareness of the field itself. The primary audience for this program is expected to be undergraduate and graduate students selecting a major or contemplating further education and a career path.

The focus of this project is to provide students with highly visual and interactive information and data. The program will seek to exploit the global reach of the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW), to maximize information distribution and electronic interaction with people currently working in the field. Simultaneously, a multimedia presentation capitalizing on the expanding appeal of the CD-ROM (compact disk-read only memory) media, enhanced by illustrative capabilities of quicktime video, will be developed with the assistance of experts in these media formats.

The center will be completed within two years. The program is being coordinated by Gerald L. Liedl, TMS Education Director and department chair at Purdue University, and Vicki Koebnick, TMS Manager of Education & Professional Affairs.