THE ABCs of ITS, TTP, CEE, and XYZ...
by Prof. Patricia L. Mokhtarian
Chair, Graduate Group in Transportation Technology and Policy
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Associate Director for Education, Institute of Transportation Studies
plmokhtarian@ucdavis.edu
ITS-Davis versus conventional academic departments
The organizational structure of universities in general, and UC Davis in particular, can be a little confusing. We will try to demystify it as much as possible here, but it is likely to take some time for various things to sink in - some of us have been here quite a while and still don't have it all figured out. So don't be afraid to ask questions if you are puzzled!
Three types of fundamental organizational units at UCD are
- academic departments
- graduate groups (GGs)
- organized research units (ORUs)
These three categories are not mutually exclusive - the same individual can belong to one or more academic departments, several graduate groups, and one or more ORUs!
Academic departments are organized along traditional disciplinary lines (although those lines change over time, of course), and grouped under colleges (Engineering, Letters and Science, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences) and professional schools (Management, Medicine, Law...). Departments offering transportation-related classes and degrees include Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Economics, Environmental Science and Policy, and others. Formula-based state funding for the campus is largely administered through these departments.
Graduate groups are multi- or interdisciplinary degree-granting programs (M.S., Ph.D., or both). The Transportation Technology and Policy program is a graduate group. UC Davis is unusual in its emphasis on these programs; more than half of our graduate student body is enrolled in graduate groups! We see this as a competitive advantage, allowing the campus to stay nimble and respond more quickly to the shifting intellectual frontiers of discovery.
However, there is little "hard-wired" (formula-driven) funding for such programs. Thus, few of them have tenure-track faculty exclusively assigned to them. Most GG faculty have primary appointments in one or more academic departments (and draw all of their salary from those departments plus any administrative duties carrying a stipend), as well as membership in one or more GGs (which carries no salary aside from a token stipend for the chair). Accordingly, it is also rare to have permanent courses offered exclusively through and for a GG. Nearly all GGs are housed within an academic department for administrative purposes (thereby sharing space and administrative resources with the host department), although its faculty are typically drawn from a number of different departments.
Organized research units are multi- or interdisciplinary research centers. The Institute of Transportation Studies is an ORU , among a dozen or so others at UCD. Although the campus supplies some administrative funding to ORUs, most of their budgets derive from "soft money," that is from research grants, corporate, foundation and private gifts - generally competitive funding that is brought in through faculty/staff proposals and relationships, and which therefore fluctuates from year to year depending on the collective success of those efforts.
The TTP program is unique among graduate groups in being hosted by an ORU, namely ITS-Davis . We consider it quite a natural marriage that an interdisciplinary research unit should foster an interdisciplinary degree-granting program. But it does create some challenges in terms of budget (both ITS and TTP are soft-money - no hard-money academic department to fall back on) and in terms of competing for other scarce resources such as space and administrative support.
TTP faculty are drawn not only from ladder-rank faculty with regular departmental homes, but also from (typically post-Ph.D.) researchers who have an ongoing relationship with ITS.
TTP versus CEE - how to decide?
There are two degree-granting transportation programs at UC Davis: one through the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department, and one through the interdisciplinary Graduate Group in Transportation Technology and Planning (TTP), administered by the Institute of Transportation Studies. Please be very clear which program you are applying to, as it causes problems down the road if your application is sent to the wrong place! (Even though some of the same people are involved in both programs, the bureaucracy has a process to follow...).
The newer TTP program was developed for students without a traditional civil engineering background. Its approach is multidisciplinary, and offers considerable flexibility to build a customized curriculum around a relatively few core courses. However, it also has five prerequisite courses: two courses in calculus, and one each in linear algebra, calculus-level probability/statistics and (calculus-level) microeconomics. These courses should be taken before you arrive, or as soon thereafter as possible, and will not count toward the degree. Established in 1997, the TTP program has grown rapidly, so that it is now our largest program. See http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/ttp/index.php for complete information on this program.
The CEE program ( http://cee.engr.ucdavis.edu/Graduate/Transportation/TransGS.htm ) is well-established, and offers a "mainstream" degree, generally to those with a civil engineering background. Those entering the CEE program without a civil bachelor's degree would have to take a significant number of courses in areas such as fluid mechanics and thermodynamics to establish a basic competency in core CE areas. For the transportation program itself, we would require "tougher" (more quantitative, theoretical-end) courses of a CEE student than of a TTP student. For example, we would expect a CEE student to take ECI 256 and/or 254, courses that are not required for TTP students. Beyond that, however, the CEE program is characterized by the same multidisciplinary and flexible philosophy that the TTP program has. The two programs share many of the same core faculty and course possibilities, and it is possible for a student in either program to have an identical curriculum.
Some people, especially those with a CEE background, prefer the CEE program because that degree is well-recognized. Depending on your career goals, it may be easier to find a faculty position in a CEE department if you have a CEE Ph.D., for example, than if you have a TTP Ph.D. (although for many universities, having a bachelor's degree in CEE would suffice; the higher degrees need not be in civil). On the other hand, other people, including those with a CEE background, value the TTP degree because of the combination of technology and policy in its title. They are "diversifying their degree portfolio" so to speak, demonstrating that they can relate to both areas within transportation. And as for concerns about fitting in to a CEE department with a TTP Ph.D., you'd have to ask yourself, if you are committed to a multidisciplinary approach to transportation, how happy would you be in a CEE department that is too traditionally focused to welcome someone with a degree like TTP? In other words, by going the CEE route just to make yourself more employable, you may be mainly qualifying yourself for jobs you wouldn't really want anyway.
Students interested in an urban planning faculty position may have similar concerns: will a TTP degree look acceptable to a planning program? We have two thoughts on that. First, you may well find a hospitable faculty position with an interdisciplinary program analogous to ours. For example, the official departmental home of UC Davis TTP faculty member Susan Handy, whose Ph.D. is in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and who came to us from the Architecture and Urban Planning faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, is the highly multidisciplinary Environmental Science and Policy department. Such a department at another university would certainly be interested in our TTP graduates. Second, we now have the precedent of Michael Clay, a recent TTP Ph.D. who was hired by the School of Architecture (urban planning program) at Auburn University - a very mainstream planning program - right out of grad school here. He also had an Urban Planning M.S. from elsewhere, but the point is that a TTP Ph.D., when combined with other desirable qualifications (which may include "degree diversification"), does seem to be marketable to traditional departmental programs.
Thus, there is no single answer to the question of which degree program is best; it depends on your background, interests, career plans, and desired time to degree.
You cannot apply to both programs at the same time. However, if you were to be accepted into one program and later decide that you'd rather be in the other program, it is generally not a problem to transfer. People switch programs, in both directions, all the time. And if you don't already have a related M.S., you may want to get a master's degree in one program and a Ph.D. in the other.