BUIES CREEK, North Carolina—Campbell University will officially open its School of Engineering with 96 students and welcome its inaugural cohort of 46 students in the Catherine W. Wood School of Nursing Wednesday, Aug. 24, when the university holds its first day of classes of the 2016-17 academic year.
“This is a historic moment for Campbell University,” said Campbell President J. Bradley Creed. “These programs grew out of the state’s and region’s needs for engineers and health professionals. We are thrilled to finally have on campus our first engineering and nursing students. They will help advance Campbell’s mission to prepare servant leaders who make an immediate impact in the communities where they live.”
Campbell Engineering is only the second engineering school at a private university in North Carolina. It offers an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Science in General Engineering degree with concentrations in mechanical engineering and chemical/pharmaceutical engineering. Seventy-seven of the inaugural class intend to concentrate in mechanical engineering and 19 in chemical/pharmaceutical engineering.
“The whole campus has been working incredibly hard the last 12 months to get ready for this day,” said Dr. Jenna P. Carpenter, founding dean of Campbell Engineering who started preparing for the school’s launch in July 2015. “We could not be more excited to welcome this special group of students to campus.”
The inaugural engineering cohort is comprised of 78 incoming students and 18 current students transferring from other programs within Campbell. The first-year engineering students arrive with more Advancement Placement credits than nearly all the other majors, boosting the academic profile of the entire Class of 2020 — the strongest entering class academically in the university’s 129-year history.
“We are thrilled to have such a strong inaugural engineering class,” Carpenter said.
Campbell Engineering will be housed in Carrie Rich Memorial Hall. The university revamped Carrie Rich this summer so it includes The Creek Makerspace, a state-of-the-art lab with several 3D printers, an embroidery machine, a vinyl cutter, and Dell Precision Desktop workstations; Camel Fab Engineering Fabrication Facility, a professional-grade metal and woodworking fabrication facility; an Area 87 Foundations of Engineering Design Lab; Camel Collaborative Commons; an Engineering Think Tank Quiet Study Lounge; and several classrooms specifically designed for the hands-on, projects-based, collaborative learning that will define Campbell Engineering.
“The buzz about our learning spaces, labs, equipment and innovative designs has already attracted significant attention,” Carpenter said. “I long ago lost count of how many drop-in tours I have given of Carrie Rich this summer.”
Campbell’s Board of Trustees approved adding an engineering school in November 2014, and Campbell received approval from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) to offer the Bachelor of Science in General Engineering degree in September 2015.
The school will also pursue accreditation by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) when eligible, which will be once the charter engineering class graduates in 2020.
School of Nursing enrolls inaugural class
The inaugural cohort of 46 nursing students will begin class Wednesday, too, in the newly opened Tracey F. Smith Hall of Nursing & Health Sciences. Located on Campbell’s Health Sciences Campus on U.S. 421 in Lillington, the 72,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art teaching facility is designed to be a space for collaborative learning and team building while allowing students to experience the challenges and rewards of healthcare in a psychologically-safe environment.
“We are thrilled by the thoughts of throwing away the three-hour lecture block and engaging learning teams with active teaching strategies,” said Dr. Nancy Duffy, director of Campbell Nursing. “This ‘team’ will put to use their communication strategies from COMM 261 and deal with a variety of personalities and learning preferences as they apply knowledge from Day 1. We are committed to graduating a student with team skills.”
Unlike most majors within a university system, Campbell Nursing does not enroll students until they are juniors or have met all the program requirements and fulfilled all program prerequisites. This ensures that nursing students have successfully completed Campbell’s general core curriculum so they can focus on a rigorous nursing curriculum that involves patient care and clinical experiences during their junior and senior years.
Campbell Nursing does not enroll everyone who completes the requirements either. Students must apply for admission to the upper-level division coursework. That process includes a competitive, holistic application, in addition to an interview with faculty members and a personal essay. The school accepts only a maximum of 50 students per academic year.
Campbell offers a pre-nursing track for first-year students and sophomores. Since the university started offering the pre-nursing track in 2014, it has been one of the most popular area of studies for incoming students. This year’s new class includes 101 pre-nursing students. Campbell enrolled 121 pre-nursing students in 2015 and 85 in its first pre-nursing seminar in 2014.