SEAS Fact Sheet

The SEAS student body is a highly diverse mix of bright young adults from around the world.

Fact: The average SAT composite score of this year’s entering SEAS class was 1300.
Fact: 84% of the students in this year’s entering SEAS class were in the top 20% of their respective high school classes.
Fact: The female/male student ratio at SEAS is 1:3, much higher than that of most engineering schools.
Fact: 9% of the SEAS undergraduates are African-American.
Fact: Among its 500 undergraduate students, SEAS counts 120 international students from more than 25 countries.

The SEAS engineering education emphasizes contact with faculty, research experiences, and extra-curricular engineering opportunities.

Fact: The student/faculty ratio at SEAS is 5:1.
Fact: 100% of the SEAS full-time faculty have a doctoral degree.
Fact: All SEAS students complete senior research projects of their own design that provide them with hands-on learning opportunities that complement their classroom learning.
Fact: 35% of SEAS students take advantage of the numerous internship and co-op work opportunities that exist in Washington, D.C. and the northern Virginia and Maryland technology corridors.
Fact: SEAS has more than 20 engineering-related student organizations and projects in which students can participate.

Engineering at SEAS encompasses a broad range of disciplines, with a strategic focus on biomedical engineering, transportation/safety and security, and information technology/telecommunications.

Fact: SEAS has five academic departments, which offer the bachelor of science and bachelor of arts degrees to undergraduates and five degrees to graduate students.
Fact: GW has selected seven academic areas of strategic focus from across the University, and it has begun funding those areas to support their continued development. Two of the seven areas—biomedical engineering and transportation/safety and security—are SEAS areas of academic excellence.
Fact: The SEAS undergraduate biomedical engineering program grew 150% in its first full year as an academic program.
Fact: The SEAS transportation/safety and security programs were awarded more than $20 million in research funding during 2001-03.
Fact: SEAS has received more than $4 million in grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense to help secure the nation’s infrastructure by providing scholarships for students to study computer security and by further developing a portable computer security laboratory.
Fact: The SEAS high-performance computing laboratory is a member of one of the five teams across the United States to earn a slot on a U.S. Department of Defense project to conceive and produce the next generation of supercomputers.

SEAS maintains several state-of-the-art research facilities, where our faculty and students work in partnership with public and private sector organizations.

Fact: Created with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the GW earthquake simulator—or “shake table” as it’s more commonly known—is the only one of its kind on the East Coast of the United States. Powered by hydraulics and with six degrees of freedom, it simulates motion in three translational and three rotational degrees.
Fact: SEAS has a Portable Educational Network (PEN), which simulates the Internet but is not connected to the Internet, allowing students to get hands-on experience learning how to better defend computer systems and programs on the Internet from various kinds of attacks. The PEN was built using a capacity building grant from the U.S. Department of Defense and a generous donation of machines and systems from Cisco Systems.