(MURFREESBORO) It has been quite a year for the Middle Tennessee State University Master of Science in Professional Science program. The university now has more than 300 combined undergraduate and graduate programs.

One new concentration, fermentation science, was added to the mix, joining actuarial sciences, biostatistics, biotechnology, engineering management, geosciences and health care informatics as areas of pursuit.

In August, MSPS celebrated its largest graduating group to date as 46 students completed internships with companies and institutions and 82 for all of 2019.

MSPS is a groundbreaking two-year master's degree program that combines curricula in business and STEM -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- to produce in-demand, working graduates, many of whom land with the companies they interned with for one or more semesters.

Also known nationally as Professional Science Master's, or PSM, the MTSU degrees equip students for successful careers in business, nonprofit, government or the academic world.

"The year has been excellent," said Saeed Foroudastan, MSPS director and College of Basic and Applied Sciences associate dean. "The reason is most of our students -- we are graduating 50 to 60 a year --all have jobs and an average salary between $60,000 to $75,000 a year, and the companies want them really bad. So they are doing very well."

"Our growth has been good," Foroudastan said. "We're graduating almost 50 percent more than a couple of years ago." About 70 percent of them land a job or receive an offer at the place where they interned, he added.

"It's an excellent marriage between the Jones College of Business and the College of Basic and Applied Sciences because you take business classes and science classes together," he said.

Jessica McLain, 25, of Clarksville, Tennessee, and formerly from Wilmington and Fayetteville, North Carolina, was one of 22 MSPS graduates Dec. 14. The actuarial sciences student interned at Brentwood, Tennessee-based Findley. She expects to continue working there until May when she and her husband, Tyree, a specialist in the U.S. Army at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, will move to Washington, D.C., as he will take an IT communications position at The White House.

"It (the program and internship) has gone very well. I've learned a lot about actuarial work ... quick shortcuts in Excel, Word, Access and Microsoft tools," said McLain, who will look for an actuarial job and hopes to have it lined up by the time they move.

Engineering management graduate student Colin Fulgenzi, 31, already works at Nissan North America in Smyrna, Tennessee, in the quality vehicle management program, from concept to end of production, making sure vehicles hit all of the quality objectives and serving as 'the voice of the customer,' he said.

In Fulgenzi's internship at Nissan, he "had to come up with additional things to do." His extra projects involved the vehicle fleet management system, inventory tracking system and software introduction.

Three of the MSPS students performed their internships in China and made online presentations.

The master's program earned the Tennessee Board of Regents Academic Excellence Award in 2010 and has been regarded as a model for other programs by the Washington, D.C.-based Council of Graduate Schools.

MTSU has more than 300 combined undergraduate and graduate programs.