Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 57) Goes Coastal Its campus may not have dormitories or a football stadium, or the students to fill them, but Georgia Tech Savannah offers students the same world-class engineering education found on the Atlanta campus in a more intimate, coastal setting. This Isn’t Georgia Tech Lite A FTER HE’S AWARDED A BACHELOR’S DEGREE FROM Georgia Tech, Taylor Wimberly hopes to get a job with the federal government and travel the world. But the Hinesville, Ga., native, who professes to being a bit of a country boy, wasn’t interested in traveling as far as Atlanta for college. Wimberly, a fourth-year civil engineering major, now is in his second year at Georgia Tech Savannah. He spent his freshman and sophomore years at Armstrong Atlantic State University. The appeal to Georgia Tech Savannah? “It’s not Atlanta for one,” Wimberly says with a smile. “I didn’t have to deal with the big city and that kind of stuff. It was more economically feasible to stay at home.” Since 1998, the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program has allowed students like Wimberly to obtain Georgia Tech degrees in civil, computer, electrical, environmental or mechanical engineering without ever setting foot on the North Avenue campus. Students in the program begin their undergraduate careers by taking their core courses at one of three partner institutions: Armstrong Atlantic State University, Georgia Southern University or Savannah State University. They then transfer to Georgia Tech at the start of their junior years to complete their engineering degrees. The program, Frost says, grew out of a desire between the chancellor’s office and the Board of Regents to initiate additional engineering-education activities in the southern part of the state. An ancillary goal to spur economic growth in the region through graduate programs and research activities led to the creation of a new Georgia Tech campus. After a series of discussions involving the Board of Regents, chancellor’s office, Georgia Tech and the GTREP partner institutions, and a donation of land to the University System of Georgia by the Savannah Economic Development Authority, Georgia Tech Savannah opened its doors in 2003. The campus occupies a 46-acre tract of land in an industrial park about 10 miles northwest of downtown Savannah. A cafe, library, student Photo: Raul DeJesus Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Fall 2008 57
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