Rice’s Engineering Product Management Graduate Certificate

Certificate Curriculum and Requirements

Rice Engineering’s online courses teach more than practical, career-ready skills – they teach a growth mindset.

Rcel 503: Engineering Product Management in Industry 4.0

The fourth and latest industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, is comprised of intelligent automated machines and devices being developed by unconstrained manufacturing technologies (e.g., 3D printing), which can give them unprecedented sensing and communication capabilities. The internet of things (machines and sensors and the ‘big data’ they output) is creating new avenues for the remote collection of data from these new products. Engineering leaders will have a unique opportunity to guide engineering teams to create products that can leverage and evolve based on data from the supply chain to customer usage.

Rcel 504: Ethical-Technical Leadership (3 credits)

Technology-based companies are powered by teams of engineers who create products and services that create value and competitive advantages for organizations that can turn into profits. However, the matrices of technical and user-related decision paths that engineering leaders make to guide the team are not always constrained by ethics in a formal way.

This course will help students understand the impact of ethics on engineering and technology in order to apply ethics concepts to decision-making on issues that emerge in the workplace during one’s career. In order to enroll in an online section of this course, you are expected to have a working camera and microphone. During class sessions, you must be able to participate using your microphone and you are expected to have your camera on for the duration of the class so that you are visible to the instructor and other students in the class, just as you would be in an in person class.

Rcel 506: Applied Statistics and Data Science for Engineering Leaders (3 credits)

Modern engineering leaders face myriad projects and problems that involve the generation, collection, analysis, visualization and interpretation of data, much of which is now known as big data (upwards of millions of observations) and/or high-dimensional (upwards of millions of variables). In turn, engineering leaders must be able to leverage the abundance of data to generate new knowledge and be proficient in data-driven decision making. This course will provide a foundation in statistics and data science with a view toward preparing engineering leaders to engage and direct teams in data based solutions to engineering problems.

Internship Practicum (1-3 credits)

Graduate students may select 1 course from either RCEL 541: Internship Practicum for Engineering Leaders (1 credit) or a Certificate Elective (mostly 3 credits). For more information, see the requirements for the Certificate in Product Management for Engineering Leaders, Online Program.