Get quick answers about Systems Engineering at the Schaefer School at Stevens, including what the field covers and key curriculum areas. For more details, visit our undergraduate or graduate program pages.
FAQ
What is an engineering management degree?
The bachelor's degree in Engineering Management merges a traditional engineering background — covering math, science, and core engineering topics — with courses focused on management. These classes often include accounting, cost analysis and managerial economics to build financial and business decision-making abilities. Students also study quality management, project management and production/technology management to learn how to plan and enhance technical projects. The program frequently features courses in systems engineering and engineering design, enabling graduates to effectively integrate people, processes, data and technology within complex engineering organizations.
The Engineering Management master's program (M.Eng./M.S.) blends core courses with electives, enabling students to tailor their degree in fields like project management, quality, production/technology management, and engineering economics/cost analysis. Its goal is to supplement an engineering or technical background with leadership development, operational decision-making and analytical skills necessary for managing teams, projects and complex technical organizations. Typically, students complete structured coursework centered on management and systems, then select electives to enhance their expertise in a chosen area aligned with their career aspirations.
The Engineering Management Ph.D. is a research-intensive doctoral program focused on advancing the field through rigorous scholarship and high-level design across domains such as finance, manufacturing, public policy and services. The curriculum emphasizes systems thinking and integrates management, technology and social-science perspectives to study how technology and business practices interact in complex human/technological systems. Doctoral students complete key milestones such as required coursework, qualifying exams, a dissertation proposal/defense and an original dissertation that contributes new knowledge to engineering management.
What do engineer managers do?
Engineering managers oversee technical teams, ensuring projects are completed on time, within budget and to quality standards. They turn business objectives into technical strategies, establish priorities and roadmaps, assign resources and handle risk management. Additionally, they coordinate across departments such as product, finance, operations, vendors and compliance, and mentor and hire engineers while enhancing processes like metrics, continuous improvement and quality and safety protocols.
Historically, our graduates have gone on to work at employers across a wide range of industries — including finance, engineering services, business consulting, technology, healthcare, aerospace and defense, manufacturing and government. Companies that have hired our graduates in the past include firms such as Amazon, Google, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin and others of similar scale and scope. For the most current outcomes data, visit our Career Outcomes page.
Do engineering managers need to be technical?
Engineering managers usually need enough technical knowledge to understand their team's work, ask insightful questions and make well-informed tradeoffs, even if they don't handle daily design or coding tasks. A solid grasp of math, science and fundamental engineering principles allows them to estimate effort, assess risks and limitations, and leverage data to balance cost, schedule, quality, safety and performance. This technical literacy also enhances their credibility with engineers and fosters clearer communication between technical teams and business stakeholders. Ultimately, this capability supports better planning, more decisive choices and fewer surprises as projects evolve from concept to completion.
What type of degree is software engineering?
Software Engineering is typically offered as a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree focused on building reliable, maintainable software systems. It combines core computing topics like programming, data structures, algorithms and computer systems with engineering practices such as requirements, design, testing, quality and teamwork. Programs also include math foundations — especially in discrete math and statistics — and electives in areas such as cybersecurity, AI or software architecture. Overall, it prepares students to develop and manage software across its full lifecycle.
Our Software Engineering (B.E.) program is product-focused and applies engineering practices to the full software development life cycle — from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance. While Computer Science tends to emphasize the underlying principles of computing from a more theoretical and mathematical perspective, Software Engineering's life-cycle focus makes it well-suited for roles centered on building and delivering production software with strong process and quality practices — such as software engineer, full-stack developer, QA/test automation engineer, DevOps/site reliability engineer or technical product and project roles that work closely with delivery teams. Both degrees can lead to many of the same careers, but Software Engineering is typically the stronger fit if you are most interested in designing, shipping and maintaining real-world software products at scale.