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When school opened for this academic year, Greg Hughes '67, vice provost for information technology, hoped Rensselaer's new B.S. in IT would attract at least 25 new Rensselaer students.
   More than 70 are enrolled! And interest is mounting.
   In addition, Rensselaer has created an innovative M.S. in IT program that also allows professional students to attend classes at a distance using electronic media.
   Guided by faculty, alumni, and industry partners, Rensselaer has responded to the explosive need for IT professionals throughout the world and in every field.
   The new B.S. in IT is a unique program that provides solid grounding in IT but doesn't stop there. Unlike curricula at other universities, the Rensselaer program features an application focus on a second discipline such as entrepreneurship, arts, bioinformatics, communication and networking, and engineering.
   Other focus disciplines include marketing, multimedia data and knowledge management, psychology, pre-med, and simulation-based science and engineering.
   "Rensselaer is the first university that I know of that's taken a multidisciplinary approach," says Rensselaer Trustee Paula Simon '68, vice president for information technology services at MetLife.
   "We all have seen and know about strict engineering or computer science kinds of IT programs. RPI adds the second component that is discipline specific. That's what makes this really special," Simon says.
   In graduate education, Rensselaer has created an all-new M.S. in IT program for students at the Troy campus, at Rensselaer at Hartford, and at 58 corporate sites now served by Rensselaer's Office of Professional and Distance Education.
   In addition, Rensselaer is developing interactive Web-based IT courses at the graduate level. Students around the world will be able to register for certificate programs or pursue advanced IT degrees at home, at the office, or on the road.
   Rensselaer's graduate and undergraduate IT programs prepare students for a fundamentally changed workplace where they will use IT to reshape medicine, law, communications, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, finance, computing, and biotechnology.
   "A grounding in information technology will give people access not just to data, or information, but to knowledge-knowledge for the engineer, the architect, the banker, the insurance person," says Rensselaer Trustee Nicholas Donofrio '67, senior vice president for technology and manufacturing at IBM.
   "There isn't an industry or occupation in the world that is going to escape this explosion in digital capability that we call information technology," Donofrio says.
   For more information on IT at Rensselaer, contact Greg Hughes at (518) 276-2660, hughesg@rpi.edu, or visit the IT Web page at www.rpi.edu/IT.

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