Recently, the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council has issued the “Corresponding Adjustment Notification of the List of the Units Authorized to Confer Master’s Degrees and Doctor’s Degrees of Engineering” (Degree [2019] No. 5), and officially announced the corresponding adjustment results for engineering master’s professional degrees. USST has been approved to be among the units authorized to confer 8 master’s professional degrees in: Electronic Information, Mechanical Engineering, Materials & Chemical Engineering, Resources & Environment, Energy & Power Engineering, Civil Engineering, Water Conservancy, Biology & Medicine, as well as Traffic & Transportation, which means that USST now covers all the categories of the former engineering master’s professional degrees. The enrollment and enrolled engineering graduate students in 2019 are still to be trained and conferred their respective degrees according to the pre-adjusted engineering fields. Until 2020, the enrollment, training and degree conferment will be implemented based on the adjusted engineering professional degree categories.
USST has attached great importance to the notification since it received it in March of 2018. To successfully complete the application of the corresponding adjustments, USST has organized several rounds of exchanges and discussions with the coordination of relevant schools and colleges. The corresponding adjustments of the engineering professional degree categories are organized according to the “Notification on Categories Adjustment of the Engineering Professional Degree Category Issued from the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council and the Ministry of Education” (Degree [2018] No. 7) with the aim of implementing the spirit of the 19th Party Congress, realizing the qualitative development of higher education and speeding up the construction of an innovative country to provide better services for national engineering technology and industrial development. Considering such factors as academic nature and reality, prescriptive nature and autonomy, stability and flexibility as well as localization and internationality, our country has learned a lot from other universities both at home and abroad about the division of engineering fields, and has re-divided the current master degrees in engineering (40 fields in total) into 8 professional degree categories according to the professional degree categories and specific field concepts in engineering on the basis of the engineering field training requirements and knowledge systems.
The current adjustment of engineering professional degree categories is an important opportunity for the development of professional degree education in USST. So far, the number of professional degrees in USST has increased from 11 to 18, which is sure to play a positive role in the construction of a first-class professional degree training system and the cultivation of high-level applied talent.
