5 Questions for Seth Fraden: How to boot up a new engineering program

Starting a new engineering program at a university is no simple task. But that's just what Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is doing. By 2026, the university will offer an undergraduate engineering degree-but without creating an engineering department. Instead, Brandeis aims to lean on its strong liberal arts tradition, in hope of offering something dif-ferent from the more than 3,500 other engineering programs in the United States accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technol-ogy (ABET). IEEE Spectrum spoke with Seth Fraden, one of the new program's interim cochairs, about getting a new engineering program up and running.