<p>I guess the only reason they let some people into schools like MIT, Stanford and Caltech is because they want to remove all the engineers with huge egos, so that the state schools can take all the really smart engineers that actually do meaningful work. </p>
<p>And you're right, research is just a nationally funded asylum for these narcissistic brand-name engineers and uppity jerks who get above 3.0 gpas to come up with crazy ideas and then pat themselves on the back. And I guess companies like nvidia and AMDs are just for slackers who want to play video games all day, while real engineers who know you really don't want to get much more than 2.5 get hired by real companies and make real products for real people to use, while really getting paid $320k a year, right out of school, because they just keep it so real. </p>
<p>Why didn't someone have the courage to tell me this sooner? WHY?!</p>
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No offense, but I think that's becauase the quality of students is much worse at your "lowly state school" than at Princeton. Red Sox explained it perfectly. The material is about the same. The difficulty of the tests are probably the same also. It's the quality of students that is different. Since you are curved against your fellow classmates, it's harder to get higher grades at a top school. Don't buy into the grade inflation BS.
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Oh, the caliber is much different. There is no doubt there.</p>
<p>I highly doubt Princeton, for engineering, is comparable to MIT, Cal Tech, U-M, GA Tech, or Cal in difficulty (the amount of work required for a student to get a grade).</p>
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While some employers do care which college you graduate from, a vast majority don't and 3.0 seems like the cut off GPA for many firms.
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I agree, most of they don't care about what college you are from, only your relevant experience. BUT, that's not going to matter if you can't get an interview so you can convince them how great you are for the job. Your chances of getting an interview is magnitudes higher when you have a chance to talk to a recruiter face to face rather than be buried in an online resume database amidst tens of thousands of other applicants. Many many more companies recruit at large well respected engineering schools versus less well known ones. I learned this from experience. In undergrad (a less well known school), I sent a ton of resumes out, only to be ignored. In grad school (a well known top school), I applied to the same companies, except this time I actually got to talk to the recruiters at job fairs. What a difference. I got interviews with many of same companies that ignored me just months ago. AMD, NI, Nvidia, HP, CISCO, TI, you name it. Make no mistake, competition is still extremely intense at these companies. In my experience even if you do go to a school they recruit at, your chances of getting hired are approximately 100 to 1. Are you going to get a quality education from a less well known school? Definitely, I loved my undergrad education. But the career opportunities just does not compare to the likes of top schools.</p>
<p>Princeton caps As at 35%, and that's the highest they will go.</p>
<p>Do any of you follow the major news like WSJ or NyTimes? Princeton is always on the front page at least once a week. Grade deflation is what Princeton adopted. We do not have inflation, I can guarentee you that. Search google "princeton grade deflation"... we are the Ivy League that adopted such as a practice.</p>
<p>Graduating with a 3.00gpa put you in the bottom 15% of graduates at Princeton in 2002. They are now trying to curb massive grade inflation as are other colleges around the country.</p>
<p>They aimed for 35%, it is probably around 40%....Thats a lot of A's</p>
<p>There is also a huge difference between being taught by academic teachers that aren't or nor have ever been practicing engineers. compared to being taught by true engineers who know what they are talking about. Professors that have real world experience tend to be much much harder on there students. such as my friend who is taking a Space Dynamics class at my school. It is taught by a retired Nasa Engineer who was one of the lead engineer for Atlas 5. He gives problems that are so insane. Each problem takes at least 70 hours to do and they are usually 30-40 pages of a engineering pad. Plus it all then needs to be calculated in matlab. </p>
<p>Now I go to a state school, and the education is pretty dam intense. I am sure and guarantee my curriculum at a state school is more intense than that at Princeton. I am also sure that the other top schools mentioned are harder than mine, such as the JPL at Cal tech, But I dont think priceton is to great at engineering. Not to put you down, But if you really want to be a engineer get out of there.</p>
<p>does it really matter if you're undergraduate?
If I were given a choice between princeton and gatech even for engineering, I'd definitely go for princeton.</p>
<p>Well, I've heard that physics and math classes are really frigging hard at Princeton. I don't know about anything else though. </p>
<p>Amnesia, why are you majoring in? Maybe you can try to take some of the classes in which the teachers grade very leniently for your distribution requirements to balance the hard classes that are required for your core.</p>