Maltese Engineering Education Update

This past Tuesday, professor Simon Fabri from the University of Malta came to a site that we were mapping with two of his upper division students. They were working on similar robotics projects, and visited to check out how we were collecting data. Midway through the day Brent and I stepped aside with them to ask a few questions about our respective research projects.

My research topic aims to examine the similarities and differences between engineering educations awarded from Malta's two main tertiary academies: University of Malta and Malta College of Arts, Science, and Technology (MCAST). I was able to compile a few facts about each school from research done in the states, but was crippled by the distance between myself and primary resources who could tell me their first hand accounts of trends in my topic. Now that I'm here, things the research is coming along quickly.

Professor Fabri told me that being a professor at University of Malta, naturally, he had more experience with the education offered there. He said that the department of engineering was broken into 6 majors, with 2 different BS degrees offered. Mechanical, Manufacturing, and Materials/Metallurgy fed into a Mechanical Engineering BS, while Electronics, Electrical Power, and Systems fed into an Electrical Engineering BS. University of Malta also offers a 'masters by research' degree, which takes ~13 months to complete. At the moment there are about 30 students per faculty member in that program. Normally, a degree from U of M takes 4 years, but in special cases (such as the case of the two students accompanying Prof. Fabri), a degree can be completed in 3.

From what I have heard and read about the two universities, University of Malta offers traditional engineering degrees, while MCAST is a polytechnic university that offers degrees to fill a gap at the technician level. MCAST was not created for this reason, but because it is a new university it is still in the process of stabilizing itself. I have an interview lined up with Professor Carmel Pule, a professor at University of Malta who led the division of the two universities in 1978. Hopefully I will have much more information on the matter with the arrival of his response.

One thing that stood out from the interview with Professor Fabri was that engineering students at the University of Malta do not have any general education courses. Their coursework is entirely engineering based, and all of their general education is provided by the two years of school prior to tertiary education. As a student from a polytechnic university who takes one or two general education courses every quarter, to me this was quite a different way of completing a degree.

This is a rough synopsis of my research in Malta so far, and in the next blog post I will dive into more depth with some of the statistics comparing the two universities.