Guide to The Coolest College Classes!
Have a look at some of Popular Science's chosen 'Coolest College Classes in The Country'
Missouri University of Science and Technology: Experimental Mine
John B. Carnett
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. As you might expect, the program’s screening process rivals the CIA’s. Candidates must submit to an extensive background check, and non-citizens may have to shake hands with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Missouri S&T also offers an MS in explosives engineering, the first formal program of its kind in the country. The focus of an MS ranges from shaped charges, small precision bombs that either slice like a knife or punch holes in metal, to topics like blast mitigation for the military and seismic changes in rock, for better mining.
University of Alabama at Huntsville: Propulsion Research Center
John B. Carnett
Career: Rocket scientist
Learn to: Make things that go very fast and very far
Each year, 20 aeronautical- and mechanical-engineering students get eight months to design, construct, and fly a rocket to a height of exactly 5,280 feet. These aren’t hobby rockets, which typically fly to less than 1,000 feet (any higher requires an FAA permit). “Consider that an ‘A’ engine is half as strong as a ‘B’ engine, and so on,” says engineering professor Marlow Moser. “The rockets you shoot off in the park: A and B engines. Our rockets: L engines.”
Last year’s class built a 37-pound, 8.5-foot-long carbon-fiber projectile with advanced data-collection systems onboard. The nosecone carried a video camera and avionics to record the rocket’s flight path and other information; the aft end, temperature and strain sensors. Students enter their rocket in a NASA-sponsored student rocket-launching competition and present a report to the space agency’s scientists and engineers as if they were a company vying for a contract. Although the presentation is just an academic exercise, several rocket-crew alums go on to work for NASA, which has its Marshall Space Flight Center just down the road from UAH. “Here, students are playing with fire and explosives all day,” Moser says. “It doesn’t get much better than that.” 
University of California at Merced: Dawson Lab
Christoph Gerigk, courtesy GEO
Career: Marine biologist
Learn to: Dive with jellyfish
The schedule for the grad students and postdocs in the Dawson Lab this year sounds like an extended spring break, with scuba diving, snorkeling and speed-boating in places like the Gulf of Mexico, the California shoreline and the island nation of Palau. But the work they’ll do—trying to explain what the lab’s namesake, evolutionary biologist Michael Dawson, calls “the dark energy of the oceans”—is far from trivial.
Dawson and his students hope to solve one of the most puzzling aspects of the world’s oceans: where they get all their energy. Ocean mixing is the process whereby turbulence and currents redistribute heat and bring nitrogen, carbon and other elements from one part of a body of water to another. But scientists have done the math, and to see mixing to the degree they do, the ocean must be getting extra energy from some unknown source.
One candidate is the jellies. In swarms, the movements of even small animals might have a serious effect. And Palau’s Jellyfish Lake, a 12-acre sea landlocked from the ocean some 15,000 years ago and now home to millions of golden jellies, is the perfect laboratory for testing that theory. If the sum of the animal-created turbulence has a strong enough mixing effect here, then it might have a comparable effect in the oceans. Last year, Dawson’s team and its California Institute of Technology collaborators, funded by the National Science Foundation, became the first to suggest the link between jelly-swarm turbulence and ocean energy. The students spend six to 10 hours a day for months at a time in the water, swimming alongside the jellies and measuring the velocity of the tiny eddies they create as they make their twice-daily migration across the lake. It’s one of the few places in the world where researchers can get this close to an entire population of jellyfish. 
Carnegie Mellon University: Robotics Institute
Courtesy of Mike Dischner / Carnegie Mellon University
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., it now offers a minor for undergrads, who put together water-striding mini robots or turn wrenches on autonomous SUVs for the DARPA Urban Challenge, where CMU took first place last year.
Colorado State University: Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory
John B. Carnett
Career: Mechanical engineer
Learn to: Make a 2,300hp engine stronger and cleaner
Take it from CSU postdoc Sachin Joshi, you haven’t really seen an engine until you’ve climbed inside one. At the EECL, students retrofit industrial engines that reach two stories in height. One of the largest is a two-stroke, 440-horsepower combustion engine, typically used to compress natural gas and push it through underground pipes. In the lab’s 17 years, the technologies it has developed for this type of engine alone (including a now-ubiquitous fuel-injection system) have reduced nitrogen oxide emissions by an amount equivalent to taking 120 million modern cars off the highway.
Joshi and his students are now working on a 17-ton Caterpillar natural-gas-powered generator that’s capable of providing electricity for up to 1,200 homes. Utilities want to hook up the 1.8-megawatt machines to the grid in the middle of cities (to save the energy otherwise lost in transit), so they need to run clean. Caterpillar donated one to EECL. The team has already created an ignition system in which a laser travels through fiber-optic cables to optical spark plugs. It burns fuel more efficiently than the stock ignition while emitting fewer nitrogen oxides. 
Cornell University: Game Design Initiative
courtesy of the Department of Energy
Career: Videogame designer
Learn to: Create your own game
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. (The school's design software keeps code-writing to a minimum.) Each class holds a video exhibition open to the entire university. Alumni have gone on to work on blockbusters like The Sims and Spore. 
George Washington University: National Crash Analysis Center
John B. Carnett
Career: Safety engineer
Learn to: Propel a sedan at 60 mph into a roadside planter
At the NCAC, every student in the school's transportation-safety graduate program gets a car and instructions to tear it down to piles of nuts and bolts, struts and glass sheets. Then the student rebuilds the vehicle in a computer model so he can virtually crash it again and again. (Students also help with real crash tests.)
The lab works with auto manufacturers and the Department of Transportation to inform safety standards for cars and "roadside furniture," such as light poles, barriers and signs. The current curriculum confronts a recent problem on the freeways: the huge population of SUVs, minivans and other small trucks. Students are trying to figure out whether objects like highway barriers should be changed to reflect the size of the vehicles likely to be plowing into them in the future. 
Northern Kentucky University: Barton Lab
John B. Carnett
Career: Geologist
Learn to: Study Martian living conditions here on Earth
If you want to be one of the six lucky undergrads to get off the waiting list and into Hazel Barton’s course, you’d better like tight spaces, heights, the dark, bats and getting dirty—and that’s just to get to the bacteria. Unlike microbiology majors at other schools, the ones laboring over microscopes and petri dishes all day, Barton’s students study extremophile microbes where they thrive: caves.
Most of Barton’s students cave close to home, measuring groundwater pollution and studying links between microbes and cave formations. But some, with NASA assistance, accompany Barton to explore the longest quartzite cave on the planet, a rare 10-mile-long labyrinth of pink and amber sandstone on Venezuela’s Roraima plateau. It teems with microbes that researchers think could provide clues to what life might look like on Mars. Most caves are formed by limestone, a carbonate rock. The rock of Roraima, however, is mostly silicate, which is also found on Mars. The team will collect the nitrogen-eating, ammonia-spewing microbes and other strange organisms that live in the walls. Back at the lab, students will observe the bacteria’s behavior under varying conditions, gathering information that could help NASA hone its search for extraterrestrial life. 
University of Maryland: Space Systems Laboratory
wikipedia
Career: Spacesuit designer
Learn to: Test out new astronaut gear in zero gravity
Students don space suits and climb into a neutral buoyancy tank to conduct low- and zero-gravity tests on next-gen astronaut gear, as well as space- and deep-sea-bound robots. Maryland’s 50-foot-diameter, 367,000-gallon tank is one of only two in the U.S., and the only one at a university.
Students have gone on to work on the International Space Station and the Cassini and Magellan planetary probes, among others. 
Texas Tech University: Wind Science and Engineering Research Center
John B. Carnett
Career: Atmospheric scientist
Learn to: Hurl planks at walls to measure hurricane damage
In addition to launching projectiles, students in WSERC's Debris Impact Testing Lab throw themselves into the middle of real hurricanes and tornados. Before Katrina hit, students from Texas Tech were on the scene, setting up a mobile research center to take dozens of measurements, including wind velocity and the intensity of the storm's eye. Their instruments were the only ones to survive the storm intact, and now the WSERC possesses the only complete record of the intensity of Katrina's eye at landfall.
Based on the lab testing, and forays into disaster scenes during and after storms, the center was also responsible for today's more accurate F-scale for measuring the force of tornados, called the Enhanced F-Scale. It reflects the finding that lower-speed winds do a lot more damage than previously believed. When students aren't steeped in destruction, they're figuring out how to make wind power more efficient or designing homes that will hold up better in the next Katrina. 
