Don’t get me wrong, I am really glad that I studies my engineering and have reached where I have. The analytical ability to look at things wondering and figuring out how they work and what makes things tick is something that I got from Engineering. Having said that I just saw this list on Pop sci for the 30 amazing College Labs and really wanted to attend at least a few of these. Just because they are awesome and really cool. Just to summarize I thought it might be worthwhile sharing my top 10 from that list with you.

Especially now that college is starting worldwide, it would bring a bit of perspective to the various education systems around the world and hopefully bring about some change in the education systems especially in India. I remember that out of the many professors that I had during Engineering, most would agree that this might be even a good addition into the Engineering Curriculum in India. To all the teachers around the world, a very happy teachers day.

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Again, I would like to say that these are my favorite only, but all the ones listed above are awesome.

Missouri University of Science and Technology: Experimental Mine

Career: Industrial demolitions
Learn to: Blow things up extremely well

Students learn how to implode buildings, design fireworks displays, blast smooth slices of stone of quarry walls, run pyrotechnics at rock concerts, and set off special effects fireballs on movie sets.

Missouri S&T also offers an MS in explosives engineering, the first formal program of its kind. What better to learn how to explode things and to do it in style, safely. I assure you this would be the top of my list to pick up. Engineering in Fireworks and Explosives, hmm .. ooh pinch wake up ! Have to complete post.

Web site: mining.mst.edu/research/depexpmine.html

Cornell University: Game Design Initiative

Career: Videogame designer
Learn to: Create your own game

Gaming has been a personal favorite pass time for a long time, be it from Prince of Persia to Need for speed. Just imagine what would it be to be actually working and creating one. WOW. At the first Ivy League school to offer a minor in game design, students take classes like “Foundations of Artificial Intelligence” and “Computer Animation.” The final project: building their own game. (What makes things better, the school’s design software keeps code-writing to a minimum.)

Web site: gdiac.cis.cornell.edu

Carnegie Mellon University: Robotics Institute

Career: Robot designer
Learn to: Construct autonomous SUVs

Carnegie Mellon is a robot Mecca, home to ’bot builders for 29 years. The first university to award a robotics Ph.D. Just trying to build the next Optimus Prime, who could just save the world from the even cooler Megatrons. Oh wait, that Autobot also might have been built here. Aw, snap Need to stop dreaming.

Web site: ri.cmu.edu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Toy Lab

Career: Toy designer
Learn to: Build toys and test them on actual kids

Is there anything more cooler than working inventing and protyping new games ?? No absolutely not. Imagine studying making toys as a college degree. If you’re one of 90 lucky students in MIT’s most popular freshman elective. Each spring, 15 teams of six get a theme and $750 to design and prototype a toy or game. With a prototyping shop at their disposal, students can make almost anything. At the end of the day, however, play testing determines success.

Web site: web.mit.edu/sp.778/www/pages/toylab.html

University of Florida: Lightning Research Laboratory

Career: Building lightning-resistant objects
Learn to: Catch lightning—millions of volts of it

At the Lightning Lab, a group of students and researchers work around the clock all summer to trigger lightning during passing storms. A thin wire attached to a rocket acts as a kind of fuse, coaxing a bolt of lightning down the so-called plasma channel to the grounded metal launcher. There the lab’s sensor networks help solve such mysteries as the cause of each stroke’s unique electromagnetic field, or how a direct hit will affect underground cables. Maybe very soon someone there will be able to get Frankenstein online … scared anyone ?

Web site: www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu

University of California at Berkeley: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Career: Alien hunter
Learn to: Create software that looks for signs of extraterrestrials

The programs makes use of SETI@home, a supercomputer which works by tapping the power of millions of ordinary PCs all over the Web. It analyzes data from radio telescopes looking for signals from intelligent life. Berkeley SETI students help improve the search algorithms and refine the software that ties all the computers together. I remember having this screensaver on my computer a while ago, helping with the program.

Web site: seti.berkeley.edu

New York University: Interactive Telecommunications Program

Career: Interactive artist
Learn to: Design interactive videos for a 120-foot screen

Students here design interactive video for a 120-foot, high-resolution screen inside architect Frank Gehry’s InterActiveCorp building in New York, typically used to display art and advertising. One student project used animations of bees flocking to flowers to visualize complex stock market data. I would actually put on that Gears of war on this baby just to see how insane the experience would be.

Web site: itp.nyu.edu

Stanford University: Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability

Career: Development entrepreneur
Learn to: Build low-cost incubators for premature babies in Nepal

Students here take workshops ranging from welding and plastics- and metal-forming to sewing and finance before heading to countries like Nepal, India and Myanmar to identify a local problem they can engineer a solution to. Take the baby incubator designed by the 2007 student team, for example. It’s aimed at the 20 million premature and low-birth-weight infants born every year in remote locations and costs just $25 (standard hospital incubators cost $20,000). Now being developed by a spin-off company called Embrace, the incubator looks like a sleeping bag but contains a sealed pouch filled with a material that can regulate body temperature without using power or moving parts. Another company, D.light Design, which grew out of a 2006 Stanford team, is replacing polluting kerosene lanterns with solar LED lamps for the 1.6 billion people worldwide who don’t have access to electricity. These are definitely solutions we need in our country. VTU if you are hearing this is it !!

College for Creative Studies: Transportation Design

Career: Mass-transit designer
Learn to: Design a hydrogen-fueled car with wind turbines attached

Chasing a degree in the auto industry might seem a little backward right now, but CCS is the place where companies from Hyundai to Fiat sponsor projects for their most forward-looking concepts. It also places more designers in the industry than any other institution; alums include heads of design at divisions of Toyota, GM, Nissan and Mercedes-Benz.

Last year, when Hyundai challenged seniors to come up with green cars of the future, Dong Tran designed a particularly ambitious vehicle: an aerodynamic hydrogen-fueled car with wheels like wind turbines. A hydrogen fuel cell powers four independent hub-mounted electric motors, cooled by air drawn in through the center of the rims as the wheels rotate. “The cooler the better,” Tran says. “Dissipating heat prolongs life span and increases efficiency.”

Tran rendered his concept car using 3-D modeling programs, but students often build scale prototypes as well. This year, the school added a new master’s program in transportation design, one of only a few in the country, that will combine business classes with design.

Web site:collegeforcreativestudies.edu/hs/academics/transportation

Penn State University: Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship

Career: Community-based engineer
Learn to: Create biodiesel fuel—in Kenya

Penn State’s program focuses not only on creating products but employment as well. In a current project in Kenya, students work with citizens to make bio diesel from local crops and use the fuel to power a low-cost portable generator (also designed in the program) to produce electricity for the village. Surplus fuel will be sold to outside markets to provide a steady source of income for the community.

Web site: www.engr.psu.edu/hese

And we wonder why the Innovation and Out of Box thinking seems to be steaming from the west. I hope we are able to introduce at least a few of these in India, to have more free thinking entrepreneurial engineers. Don’t forget to check out the remaining 20 here : 30 amazing College Labs.