Florida Institute of Technology

Overview

The Florida Institute of Technology, also referred to as Florida Tech, is a private polytechnic university in Melbourne, Florida. It started as the Brevard College in 1958 before it became a comprehensive research-driven higher education institution. It is the state’s premier STEM University and is the home of the Florida Academy of Sciences.

Florida Tech has four distinct colleges: the College of Engineering and Science, College of Aeronautics, College of Psychology and Liberal Arts, and Nathan Bisk College of Business. Each one comprises schools, departments, research centers or institutes, laboratories, and programs.

Students can also access the university’s programs in 12 off-site areas in and out of Florida. These include Fort Eustis, Fort Lee, and Quantico in Virginia, Lakehurst Maxfield Field in New Jersey, and Kennedy Space Center. Florida Tech also offers some of its degrees partly online or wholly online such as its programs in Applied Behavior Analysis and Aeronautics.

Research in the Florida Institute of Technology is lively and has made the university into an institution with very high research activity. It has 16 research centers that are led by faculty members. Two of these are related to space: the Aldrin Space Institute and the Human Spaceflight Laboratory. Undergraduate and graduate students alike can join these institutes and be part of groundbreaking research undertakings. An example of that involved hardware that was installed in the Large Hadron Collider. Another one is collaborative research regarding life beneath the surface of Mars.

These projects are made possible by the wide range of resources available to students, faculty, and affiliated researchers. Students, on one hand, can avail of tutorial services and writing assistance. They can also go to the Evans Library for any equipment they might need for their activities such as virtual reality goggles, laptops, iPads, and drawing tablets, cameras and camera accessories, and external hard drives. Offsite students, on the other hand, can loan electronic books and digital journals via the library portal.

Graduate researchers and affiliated researchers with Florida Tech can utilize those library resources as well. If the materials they need can be found in other libraries, they can borrow them through the interlibrary loan service. Furthermore, all constituents can take advantage of the Digital Scholarship Laboratory. They can find software and other digital tools that they might require for their projects.

Outside of the academe and research fields, Florida Tech alumni are making their marks. Joan Higginbotham, George D. Zamka, Kathryn P. Hire, and Sunita Williams are astronauts who have worked with NASA. Frederick W. Sturckow is an engineer who has been on four Space Shuttle missions. Andy Casagrande is a cinematographer who won an Emmy Award in the documentary category.

You can also learn more about the educational performance of Florida Institute of Technology in our ranking of US universities & colleges.