Program in Transportation Engineering School of Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - Program in Transportation Engineering - Overview

The transportation program at Rensselaer covers a wide range of topics including traffic modeling and simulation, transportation planning, traffic operations, freight transportation, travel behavior modeling, transportation economics, disaster modeling, ITS, transit, and transportation network modeling. On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach, the program aims at enhancing transportation modeling to develop a complete picture of the broad impacts of transportation, and the best ways to manage transportation systems. Through commitment to professional excellence and integration of research and education, the program prepares students for their future leadership roles in academia, government, and industry.

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Transportation Engineering Programs of Study

The Department offers Master of Science, Master of Engineering, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. The selection of a graduate program and degree is based on student interest, area of graduate concentration, and satisfaction of prerequisites. Areas of research and initiatives in transportation include intelligent transportation systems, transportation network modeling, transportation planning and economics, sustainable freight systems, humanitarian logistics, and advanced econometrics.

The MS degree program is open to students with undergraduate degrees in engineering or the physical or natural sciences. In addition to the satisfactory completion of an approved set of advanced courses, candidates for this degree must complete 6-credit theses. In the civil engineering discipline, the theses must provide documentation of independent research-related efforts and be approved by the student's faculty advisers.

The MEng is a 30-credit structured program of advanced professional study that prepares students for professional practice. There is no project or thesis requirement, but students may elect to undertake either option, at either the 3- or 6-credit level, in consultation with their advisers.

The doctoral programs require advanced study and research conducted under the guidance of advisers. Each doctoral candidate must have at least 72 credits beyond the bachelor's degree. The PhD program is a research-oriented degree program focused on the development of new knowledge in the student's chosen area of study. It includes the preparation of a dissertation that carefully documents the original contribution of the student's research. The dissertation can represent up to 30 credits of the student's approved plan of study.

In addition to the examination processes required of all Rensselaer doctoral students, transportation engineering students must pass preliminary qualify examinations during their first years (for students with MS/ME degrees) or first 2 years (for students with BS degrees) of doctoral study.

Research Facilities

Research is supported by state-of-the-art facilities and equipment including the Rensselaer Libraries, whose electronic information system provides access to collections, databases, and the Internet from campus and remote terminals; the Rensselaer Computing System, which permeates the campus with an array of distributed advanced workstations, and servers; a shared toolkit of applications for interactive learning and research and high-speed Internet connectivity; one of the country's largest academically based, class 100 clean room facilities; high-performance campus-wide computing facilities that allow for serial or parallel computation; and 5 core laboratories.

Rensselaer's research capabilities have been enhanced with the addition of the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI). The result of a $100-million collaboration with IBM and New York State, the CCNI is one of the world's most powerful university-based supercomputing centers and a top ten supercomputing center of any kind in the world. The CCNI is made up of massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and Opteron-based clusters, providing more than 100 teraflops of computational muscle and approximately a petabyte of shared online storage.

Facilities and World-Changing Student Research

The transportation program has a long tradition of actively engaging undergraduate students in research. As part of this, undergraduate students have participated in research on the impacts of the tsunami on coastal communities in Japan, the Haiti earthquake. They have also been involved in research on traffic data collection and system performance evaluation using mobile traffic sensors such as GPS and cellular phones.

• Degrees Offered
• Major Degree Levels Offered
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
  Master of Engineering (M Eng)
  Master of Science (MS)

• Degrees Awarded
• Master's Degrees 4
• Doctoral Degrees Not reported
• First Professional Degrees Not reported
• Other Advanced Degrees Not reported
• * Shows the number of degrees awarded for the last academic year that data was reported.

• Earning Your Degree
• Part-time study available? Yes
• Evening/weekend programs available? No
• Distance learning programs available? No
• Terminal master's degree available? Yes

• Degree Requirements
• Master's Degrees Required for some
• Doctoral Degrees Required
• First Professional Degrees Not reported
• Other Advanced Degrees Not reported

• Acceptance Rate
• Applied37
• Accepted2
• Acceptance Rate5%
• Enrolled2
• Applying
• Application Fee - Domestic $75
• Application Fee - International $75
• Electronic applications accepted? Yes
• Applications processed on a rolling basis? Yes
• Application Deadlines
• Type Domestic International Priority Date
• Fall deadline January 15th January 15th Yes
• Winter deadline Not Reported Not Reported Not Reported
• Spring deadline August 15th August 15th Yes
• Entrance Requirements
• Master's DegreesGRE
• Doctoral's DegreesGRE
• First-Professional's DegreesNot Reported
• Other Advanced DegreesNot Reported
• International DegreesTOEFL required, 570 paper based, TOEFL iBT, IELTS required, IELTS paper based

• Tuition & Fees
• In-state tuition *$39,600
• Out-of-state tuition *$39,600
• International student tuitionNot Reported
• * Tuition for full-time graduate student per academic year
• Fees
• Per-academic year fees$1,896.00
• Per-term feesNot Reported
• One-time feeNot Reported
• * Fees for full-time graduate students
• Financial Support
• Financial award applicants must submitNot Reported
• Application deadlines for financial awardsFebruary 1
• Types of financial support availableFellowships, Research Assitantships, Teaching Assistantships, Institutionally-sponsored Loans, Graduate Assistantships

• Gender
• Total Graduate Students7
• Female Percentage14%
• Male Percentage86%
• Participation
• Total Graduate Students7
• Part-time Percentage0%
• Full-time Percentage100%
• Ethnicity
• Hispanic / Latino0%
• Black / African American0%
• White / Caucasian100%
• American Indian / Alaskan Native0%
• Asian0%
• Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander0%
• Two or more races0%
• Unknown0%

• Faculty Breakout
• Total Faculty3
• Full-time Percentage100%
• Part-time Percentage0%
• Female Percentage0%
• Male Percentage100%

• Existing Research
• Focus of faculty researchIntelligent transportation systems, routing algorithms, dynamic network management, user behavior
• Externally sponsored research expenditures last year$919,337