<p>I have been admitted to CIT in all depts other than ECE(I am waitlisted).I also have admission to UMICH engg. CIT has a lower ranking than UMICH in all depts other than ECE.What do i do?Where are my career prospects better?</p>
<p>When you say CIT, do you mean Caltech? If so, I would say that even if Michigan is ranked higher in individual departments, Caltech, like MIT, is slightly better then Michigan...and quality of life at Michigan is better than it is at Caltech. If you are Caltech calibre, chances are you will manage to maintain a very high GPA at Michigan. If that's the case, your job prospects are practically as good at Michigan as they are at Caltech. A 3.7+ GPA from Michigan will pretty much get you into any company and/or graduate school.</p>
<p>No, no sorry. I meant CMU-CIT</p>
<p>i was in a similar situation 3 years ago. I chose Umich even though all my friends told me to goto CMU. I saved some money coming to Umich tho, so i guess its not too bad. But, I think u get more personal educational attention at CMU and you will have better job prospects. The Umich engineering career center is pretty useless, and there are just too many students for them to care about each person. and umich engineering has a lot of slackers, its just the culture here. there is a lot of people who just want to get by with minimum amount of work. </p>
<p>when u get in project based classes (in my major, we have 5 project based classes), u will hate half of your team members. I've only had 1 good team, and have had many horrible ones. </p>
<p>I think CMU would be different, because it has the reputation of being a difficult and very academically focused school, so people enrolling there will be people who want to work hard at school.</p>
<p>My daughter is trying to decide between Michigan and CMU, and she says all her friends are telling her to go to Michigan. (for sciences, not engineering) NYao, you are very misinformed. All colleges have slackers, seriously minded people, and everything inbetween.
Both are excellent schools in their own ways. I am sorry to read that you've had such bad experiences with group projects. Every time 5 people work on something, there will usually be some conflicts. That happens everywhere.</p>
<p>Academically and reputationally, CMU and Michigan are equal when it comes to Electrical and Computer Engineering. In terms of job placement, they are also both excellent. I would really visit both schools and decide based on which environment you prefer. One of my best friends did his undergrad at Michigan and his MBA at CMU. He enjoyed both his experiences. He felt that CMU had a prettier and neater campus but he felt Michigan's campus was more impressive and more lively. There is no doubt that Michigan offers a more well-rounded college atmosphere, but CMU is excellent too.</p>
<p>You know what the difference between people on CC and the old PR is? people on CC say things like "you are misinformed", and then say "I'm sorry that you had a bad time, and hope the best for you"(paraphrasing). You guys always exhibit this kind of fake sincerety. I don't mind if you state your opinions, but do it consistently, i'm not gonna cry over your comments. Arguing on the internet is like competing in the special olympics.(nothing against retarded people) </p>
<p>I was in a similar situation, like i said, I am more qualified than you, or any other person on this forum to give my own opinions to the OP, because like the OP i was accepted to both places, almost the same major at both. </p>
<p>There are slackers everywhere, that is in a relative sense. Certain college attracts certain kinds of people. CMU attracts a lot of hard working people who want to learn, do well in school. While engineering students at Michigan might have the same IQ, same high school gpa, I've found out that a lot of them just stopped caring,thats why they came to michigan, they are in it for the party, they got to Michigan, and they wanted to chill. While all that is fine for themselves, it places other students, who want to learn, get good grades, in a ****ty situation in groups. You never went to Michigan Engineering, you are qualified to merely state your opinion, u have no first hand experience or knowledge, enough to call me misinformed.</p>
<p>NYAO, i'm also waiting to hear from Michigan, but i've got in the Sapphire program at Penn State. Do you think Penn State is better than Michigan? :)</p>
<p>(Alexandre, i'm asking NYAO...i know what your reply is gonna be) :)</p>
<p>i don't know anything about the sapphire program, but Michigan is better than Penn State. I have a friend at Penn State, seems like getting good grades is a lot easier over there.</p>
<p>i see. since you don't fancy michigan much, i suppose you think Penn State is a crap school. Do you think it would be a waste of $40,000?</p>
<p>Really? I stumbled upon this website a couple of months ago, and I have posted only about 10 times, and you think you know me already.
I am not even sure what PR is. And what is wrong with "you are misinformed"? Would "you are a dumb @ss" have been more to your liking? LOL
Look, I don't know why you are so bitter about Umch, and it's not my business. I responded to you because I actually found your posts refreshing, a bit entertaining (sorry about that). A lone dissenting voice where everyone else is trying to paint a rosy picture of U Michigan.
Call it fake sincerity if you will. It does not matter. I guess if you are old you are a hypocrite; if you are young you are naive, right?
Michigan is a large school, and it's a public institution. There is no doubt that one will encounter many unmotivated students there.
But it's not so different elsewhere. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a young Japanese co-worker of mine, who did her PhD at Cornell. She said, when she was doing TA, she was amazed how so many students were so sloppy, apathetic, and "dumb". She asked me if it's because Cornell is a "lower" ivy like they say. (She chose Cornell over MIT, Stanford, etc) What do you think?
I hope you see my point.</p>
<p>i "stumbled" upon this website 4-5 years ago, posted under a different name. Was there during the golden era of the Princeton Review discussion board,(about 5 years ago) Should I be impressed that your co-worker chose Cornell over MIT/Stanford?</p>
<p>NYao, I think the point nefer was trying to make is that you will find irresponsible students that have partying as their #1 priority in almost every major university. Obviously, schools like BYU, Caltech, CMU, Chicago, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and MIT will probably attract fewer such students than schools like Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Michigan, Penn and Stanford...but then again, the former aren't exactly known for having pleasant undergraduate environments. I personally attended Cornell for graduate school and several of my close friends attended schools like Stanford, MIT, Penn, Duke, Northwestern etc... So I know Cornell well and I also know other elite universities reasonably. I can tell you that Cornell is identical to Michigan in every way. Similar calibre students, similar commitment to education (and partying), similar resources and endowment per student, similar professional and graduate school placement, similar peer assessment score etc... The same goes for Northwestern and Penn.</p>
<p>Not at all, sour grapes. I wouldn't try to impress anyone with a co-worker's credentials. My own credentials are a bit less "prestigious" than that, so I don't dare try to impress a rising star like you with it.
As for you, if you do well at Michigan, you will go far.</p>
<p>Folks - lets get real - no one is going to get a quality engineering education at Michigan, CMU, Penn State or anywhere else without putting in a lot of hard work, irrespective of what a school's party reputation may be. Some schools may further particular interests better, but the student has to be first and foremost the keen judge of that.</p>
<p>Cornell has better post-graduation placement than Michigan. I don't know why people blindly always accept Alexandre's "Cornell is about the same as Michigan" claims. Michigan's Premed acceptance rate is always in the 50-65% range, the LSA career website says 54%. its a lot higher at Cornell.
A few years ago, there was a leaked gpa rating system by Boalt(Cal-Berkeley Law School), Cornell's GPA received a considerably higher boost than Michigan. Can you explain why Michigan receives the same reputation score when a Cornell degree is obviously viewed as more prestigious?
Not only that, Michigan also boasts a 85% employment rate within first 6 months of graduation. This number is in line with what I'm observing on campus. I highly doubt Cornell's employment rate is that low.</p>
<p>NYao, first of all, when I said Michigan placement into graduate school was similar to Cornell's, I was referring to the placement rate into top 5 graduate program...according to the WSJ. I prefer comparing apples to apples. According to the WSJ survey, Cornell was #16 and Michigan was #18 among research universities. That's almost identical if you ask me. Carnegie Mellon, which you seem to really respect, was not in the top 25 and schools like Emory, Vanderbilt and Washington University were all ranked below Michigan in that study. </p>
<p>As for Michigan's placement into Medical schools, it is hard to compare it to Cornell's because different universities have different porcesses. Michigan will not discourage a student with lower than a certain GPA to apply to Medical and Law schools. Some universities, especially private universities, will discourage students with GPAs below a certain level from applying to Medical and Law school. Let us face it, if Michigan allowed only 3.0+ students to apply to Medical or Law school, Michigan's placement rate would be well over 80%. Besides, I am not sure where you got the medical school placement rates. I always thought Michigan's placement rate into Medical school was 60%-70% (Cornell's I believe is between 70% and 80%). That figure used to be 80% at Michigan until the late 90s, but in recent years, Medical schools accross the nation have been admitting fewer students. But just look at the one undeniable fact. Last year, 500 Michigan students applied to Medical school and over 51 enrolled into Michigan's medical school alone. That number right there is staggering. 10% of Michigan premeds place into Michigan Medical...one of the top 10 Medical schools in the country. I'd say it is safe to say that at least another 50 go to similar type Medical schools. That's incredibly good. </p>
<p>As for Boalt Hall, it may value Michigan less than Cornell, but not for academic reasons. It may be because Michigan students usually do not go to Boalt Hall, even if admitted. The stats clearly support that conjecture. Last year, 150 Michigan students applied to Boalt Hall and just 5 were admitted. That's a 3% acceptance rate! Michigan's acceptance rate into Harvard (12%), Chicago (13%) and Columbia (15%) were all much higher and the stats of the Michigan students who got into those Law schools were lower than those who were admitted into Boalt Hall. I suspect that has to do with the fact that Michigan students, for some strange reason, do not attend Boalt Hall when admitted. Of those 5 who were admitted into Boalt Hall last year, ZERO attended. In fact, for the last several years, only 3 out of 32 of Michigan students admitted into Boalt Hall actually chose to attend. </p>
<p>So the fact that Cal gives Michigan a lower priority than Cornell has little to do with academic reputation. The peer assessment score is a far more telling stat than the Boalt Hall priority list. According to the peer assessment score rating, Michigan and Cornell are identical undergraduate institutions. And Gerhard Casper, Stanford's President from 1990-2000 seems to agree that Michigan is one of the top 10 undergraduate institution in the nation. </p>
<p>I doubt that Gerhard Casper's opinion is an isolated one. He is one of academe's most respected voices.</p>
<p>One thing is certain. Michigan places its students into top graduate programs at a very impressive rate. As impressive as Cornell...and the WSJ proves that. </p>
<p>As for employment figures, 85% is certainly not bad. In fact, it is amazing. No university has a better than 90% professional placement rate. I challenge you to find me a university-wide professional placement rate that is higher than 90%. I recall that CMU's 90% placement rate is ranked #1 in the nation in terms of professional placement (primarily because 75% of its students are either Engineering, Business or Computer Science majors). If highly focused and individualized programs like Wharton, Sloan, Stern and Ross barely place 90% of their students successfully, I doubt universities with large colleges of Arts and Sciences will come close to that. And look at where a chunk of Michigan students chose to work. Roughly 20% end up with companies that most students around the nation only dream of working for. Companies like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Lockheed Martin, GE etc...</p>
<p>Let us face it NYao, people on this board don't have to "blindly believe" me. The stats speak for themselves. Michigan's website is filled with factual information. One just needs to look for them.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cpp.umich.edu/students/healthmedlaw/med/medappstats.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.cpp.umich.edu/students/healthmedlaw/med/medappstats.htm</a>
here is your medical school statistics from the career center.(54%)</p>
<p>I agree there are schools that limit the applicant pool, but there are also others that don't. I don't think Cornell limits its applicants to those above a 3.0, unless you show me a source that says otherwise. (Cornell's med school acceptance rate overall is 76% overall, and 89% for those with a 3.4 gpa or above) You can look at the Michigan student GPA and MCAT breakdown. I've looked at the paper statistics, there were students with 3.7 gpa, 3.7 science gpa with 33 mcat who got in nowhere. When you look at the figures you should only look at those with gpa above 3.0, those that got in with below a 3.0 has to be URMs.</p>
<p>Michigan also sends the largest number of people to Peace Corps, this also means "employment" for the Career Center statistics. </p>
<p>That WSJ study is flawed, but lets put that aside. schools like CMU are very technical, if i'm not mistaken, the study only applies to business, law, and medical schools, so its not entirely reflective of how good the school is.</p>
<p>Alright NYao, now we are at least sharing important data. I do believe that it is unfair to compare overall mdical school acceptances between Cornell and Michigan simply because we don't know the makeup of Cornell's medical school applicant pool. If you look at the overall states, it is very probable that far more underqualified Michigan students apply to medical school than Cornell. </p>
<p>However, we can compare apples to apples by looking at the % of students with 3.4+ GPAs who were admitted into Medical school. 76% from Michigan as opposed to 89% at Cornell. There is a difference to be sure, but it is not that glaring, especially when you consider that Cornell's strengths are its science departments.</p>
<p>Secondly, although a lot of Michigan students join the Peace Corps, Wisconsin and Cal send more and as a % of the total student body, fewer than 1% of Michigan students join the Peace Corps. So even if they are included in the overall statistics, it would barely scratch the surface.</p>
<p>I agree that the Wall Street Journal survey is flawed, I have said that all along. The way the WSJ came to its final figures hurts schools like Cal, Caltech, CMU, Cornell, MIT and Michigan the most because over 25% of their students are technical and schools that aren't affiliated to the Ivy League or to schools located in the East Coast. That's because the WSJ does not include admission into Engineering Graduate programs and 11 of the 15 programs in the survey are East Coast schools, 9 of which are Ivies. But even then, it is a telling study and Cornell and Michigan are neck and neck, despite the fact that Michigan isn't an East Coast school and Cornell is actually affiliated to the Ivies. </p>
<p>At any rate, I repeat my initial statement. Cornell and Michigan are practically identical in every way. I should know, I attended both schools and have a great deal of respect for both.</p>