The University of North Carolina, the nation's first state university, is located near Research Triangle Park, home to over one hundred industries and foundations vital to the nation's ongoing research interests. The cities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham, which form the points of the "triangle," foster a unique metropolitan area offering abundant cultural and educational opportunities. The campus, covering over 700 acres, enrolls 24,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students, and is one of 16 constituent institutions of the multicampus state university.

The undergraduate program enrolls about 16,000 students from North Carolina and across the world. The educational progress of these undergraduates is built on a two tiered structure of a General College, usually years one and two, where the emphasis is on learning fundamentals and gaining breadth from a liberal arts environment. That experience is followed by the College of Arts and Sciences, nominally years three and four, where students in the Curriculum concentrate on building competitive depth in science and technological subjects.

In response to the needs of students preparing for the challenging and ever-changing world of modern technology, the University initiated the Curriculum in Applied Sciences, offering studies leading to the BS Degree in Applied Sciences. This program is designed for students having an interest in the basic problems of science combined with a desire for practical applications. The term "Applied Sciences" was selected at UNC-CH to address educational concentration in subjects often found in departments and schools of engineering and materials science yet in an institution not having an engineering component at the undergraduate level.

Our program features optional emphasis in biomedical materials, materials science of polymer, physical and electronics applications, and computer science with a hardware flavor. Within each option our program stems from strengths in the traditional sciences rather than from engineering and serves as a bridge between those approaches providing our graduates entrance into the corporate world of technology or into graduate and professional programs of biomedical engineering, materials science, physics, chemistry, medicine, polymer science, chemical engineering etc. and even into law and business. Since its inception in 1985, over two thirds of our graduates each year have gained admission into graduate, medical and other post graduate professional schools.

Applied Sciences at UNC has brought with it an educational philosophy substantially different from that of engineering. The traditional engineering education consists largely of instruction and practice in the state of the art in a particular branch of technology. However, with technology now so sophisticated and rapidly changing, such highly specialized training is often quickly outmoded. In contrast, the applied scientist is first thoroughly grounded in the fundamentals of science, especially chemistry and physics, and the mathematical methods of analysis. Experience is then gained in applying these scientific and mathematical skills to the solution of important problems in one of the optional tracks of emphasis.