The engineering college is located approximately two miles from FAMU's main campus, and just a block away from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It is where FAMU and FSU engineering majors take their engineering classes. All other courses are taught on their respective home campuses.

The FAMU/FSU College of Engineering was born out of the state legislature's unwillingness to fund two state engineering colleges within a few miles of each other. Instead, the lawmakers funneled resources toward building one college and required FSU and FAMU to work together.

"I hope I'm not stretching too far, but I would say we are, perhaps, the best African American university available, particularly, when you consider engineering," says Dr. Ching-Jen Chen, dean of the college.

Like nearly 30 percent of his faculty, Chen was born abroad (in Taiwan), but has lived in the United States for most of his adult life. The mechanical engineer earned his master's degree at Kansas State University, completed his doctorate at Case Western, and spent twenty-five years at the University of Iowa before coming to FAMU in 1992.

"I was in the Big Ten and I had never even heard of this college. In fact, I had never heard of Tallahassee" recalls Chen, who had been approached about applying for the FAMU/FSU deanship by one of his former doctoral advisors who served on the college's board of trustees.

"I said to him, `Why should I be interested in this college?,' and the one phrase he said that convinced me was, `If I were not that old, I would like to be the dean of this college,'" Chen says.

The former Alexander Von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award winner is now among the college's most vociferous advocates. He is particularly proud of its diversity and boasts that roughly half of his 2,000 students are African American.

"North Carolina A&T is the only HBCU that surpasses us in enrollment of [African American engineering students]," says Chen.