TTU College Of Engineering Gets $3 Million

The state fiscal year budget includes $3 million dollars for the College of Engineering at Tennessee Tech University.

Cookeville State Representative Ryan Williams said he began working to secure the funding in 2012.

“I was able to advocate over the last six years for the opportunity to be able to fund the engineering department at Tennessee Tech University. Six years ago the governor gave additional funding to U.T. Knoxville’s engineering department because he felt like that we needed to focus more on graduating engineers at U.T.,” Williams said. “He and I had gone round and round over this for several years.”

“All these years of advocacy paid off. I didn’t get the funding with the governor’s help, I did it with my colleagues here in the House and my good friends over in the Senate were able to get a budget appropriation for Tennessee Tech,” Williams said. “Quite frankly, I believe we will look back and say this was a seminal moment in the coming decades.”

Williams said he still couldn’t get the governor to push the funding through, so he reached out to his colleagues in the House and Senate to get the job done.

The recurring funding will focus on research programs and finding engineers who want to move to rural Tennessee and be part of Tech’s engineering department, Williams said.

“In some cases we have a hard time keeping our engineering faculty and members because the big institutions steal them from us,” Williams said. “We have to find engineers who want to stay in a rural small town instead of going to Virginia Tech or Georgia Tech.”