Curriculum setup for Ph.D. study

Number of Ph.D. graduates indicates a group's research capability. Nurturing process is time consuming. With a systematic curriculum setup, we expect to see an improved and effective outcome if not mass production of Ph.D. graduates.

People usually have the wrong impression that research has nothing to do with courses. Wrong. It has everything to do with courses. Top schools such as MIT, Stanford or Caltech have four-year engineering curricula and the BS students can smoothly transfer into researchers. One MIT circuit course is equivalent to four courses in a tier-2 university. A Caltech undergraduate course in a quarter semester can lift students to the level of semi-experts. In ten weeks twenty lectures and ten intensive homework sets, anybody with a goal of learning and disciplines can be lifted to a level that their peers in tier-2 universities will be awed.

That said, the key for effective production of Ph.D. students is curriculum design. Which set of courses should be taken and which books should be read. Without experience, an advisor may have difficulty to answer. Novice advisors feed students with papers and have weekly meetings. Experienced ones spend much less time on meetings and yet receive much better outcomes.

Design a curriculum for power engineering Ph.D. study is challenging. Power engineering itself requires a breadth and the integration of three subareas: power systems, machines and power electronics. In the previous generation, many educators and researchers, are experts in one of the three subareas. On top of power engineering fundamentals, the advanced study has to include math:  controls, operations research, etc.

Thanks to the public sharing of top schools, we now can see the contents and videos of Stanford, MIT or Caltech's theoretic courses. With such resources, all other universities and application areas can catch up, to a level that the previous generation cannot imagine.