Senate approved two new fields of study for the Department of Civil Engineering's master's and PhD programs and two new graduate diplomas in electronic commerce at its meeting on Wednesday, April 11.

The Senate approved:

• the Department of Civil Engineering's decision to offer master's and PhD program degrees in computational mechanics and water resources/environmental engineering. These two fields of study, in addition to structural engineering, represent the Faculty's main research areas.

  The Department of Civil Engineering has four faculty members with expertise in computational mechanics and most of the faculty use computer applications in their research, the majority using computational mechanics.

  The decision to offer graduate degrees in water resources/environmental engineering was made after the department received permission to hire an additional 1.5 faculty members in the water resources area. According to Graduate Council's report to Senate, this field of study has a long history at McMaster and was previously offered as a graduate program in 1993.

• two new graduate diplomas in e-commerce. The diplomas will give students the opportunity to study the technology and management of e-commerce. They will be open to students who have completed at least their first year of an MBA program and have some computer programming experience. The two graduate diplomas will build on each other.
• changes to the way the Faculty of Engineering designates its master's degrees. Starting November 2001, master's degrees requiring a thesis will be changed from Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) to Master of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.). Non-thesis master's degrees in the Faculty of Engineering will retain the M.Eng. designation.