Alabama Engineering: Teaching, Rigor, and Outcomes

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Alabama
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If you qualify, the Presidential Scholarship can free you to be able to do anything you want, whether it’s grad school, a job, a masters program, teach high school. You can also study abroad if you’d like. This is the flexibility afforded uniquely by Alabama (and a few other schools). This may be a good reason to choose this great university.

On CC, there is a notion that to have the highest likelihood of success, you need to come from a top-20 program. I don’t think this rule universally applies. At the end, your success depends on you. Completing an engineering degree is like running a marathon and your school is analogous to the trail you’re running on.

I’ll start with the benefits of the top 20 program:

  • Research opportunities
  • National recruiting
  • Rigor (only to a certain extent - I’ll get to that later) – and don’t go in thinking Alabama will be easier than a top 10 engineering school. You’ll want to work as hard as you can hard

Alabama’s EE curriculum and it seems to cover all the basics: circuits, signals and systems, communication theory, electromagnetics, semiconductors, embedded systems power systems, semiconductor theory. Their other engineering programs also look to be solid and fundamentals based, though I am unfamiliar with the standard syllabi.

Like many research universities, Alabama hosts a NSF REU program, which introduces students at Alabama and elsewhere to academic research:

For those who are interested in engineering and want to know what are the outcomes of the Alabama engineering program,
I’ve visited the lab page of Professor James Hubner at Alabama.

His lab undergraduate alumni have gone onto: Texas A&M Grad School, GA Tech Grad School, and Yale Grad School. His alumni (at UA) alone have won NASA fellowships, Goldwater Scholarships, and have gotten jobs at Shell.
Link:
http://phubner.people.ua.edu/people.html

And you can compare the syllabus of AEM 311 at Alabama to CE 309 at USC. The Alabama course is no less rigorous. I’d say generally that Alabama engineering is weaker than the top 20 or so programs and less rigorous.
http://cee.usc.edu/assets/027/88820.pdf
http://phubner.people.ua.edu/uploads/6/4/7/6/64768259/aem311_2013s_syllabus.pdf

How to make up for the lower reputation of Alabama engineering, relative to Michigan or Purdue (at least for grad school):

  • Focus on understanding the material from fundamentals and understanding how to derive solutions rigorously
  • Ask for help! If you are doing poorly, especially in your introductory classes, it’s because of poor study habits.
  • Make sure you get a very strong GPA ~ > 3.7 and ideally close to 4.0. But also challenge yourselves, take risks, and make sure you’rep ushing yourself. It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you can learn from them quickly. Just remember that the bar for grad school admission is higher at Alabama, because people are not as familiar with the program
  • Remember that successful engineers in the real world have to teach themselves a lot of concepts and “I didn’t learn it in class” is a bad excuse for not doing well
  • Participate in REUs at Alabama and elsewhere.
  • Do research on campus and be reliable. Make a positive impression on your professors. They’ve likely done their PhDs at top schools and can refer you to their advisers or other contacts.
  • Be positive about your decision to attend Alabama and don’t worry about not having been able to attend MIT or whatever other school you turned down or didn’t get into. Remember than you can go anywhere from Alabama and that others have done so.

Roll Tide

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For those who want jobs, internship or co-op experience along with a good GPA is paramount. If you achieve an excellent GPA at Alabama, you will be considered for the job along with everyone else from a good school. Ultimately though, school is about learning more than grades or GPA. Challenge yourself, take risks, learn and grow.

Starting salaries at UA are high: https://career.sa.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/ENG-Summary-Report-May-2015-Bachelors.pdf

Ultimately, being an engineer is about:

  • Being passionate about tinkering, building things.
  • Knowing math and theory (physics, linear algebra, and differential equations) and being able to apply these concepts to model physical phenomena and systems.
  • Being able to reason about the fundamental building blocks of your field. In EE, resistors, inductors, capacitors, transistors, electromagnetic fields, semiconductors and microelectronics. A lot of things that appear to be “theoretical” or “useless” are important in developing a deep understanding of the material. How do certain circuits behave when the input voltage have a certain frequency? What if the frequency is in the gigahertz, what effects are present, why?
  • Understanding how to compose smaller systems into larger systems and being able to reason about how these systems work with each other.
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I’m not sure how I feel about the hard sell tone of this thread.

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@MotherOfDragons I’m not trying to sell anything. I’m presenting facts from which people can draw whatever conclusion they want. I’m specifically trying to address real concerns people may have

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The way you are presenting it feels very high pressure Time Share saleman-y to me.

And I say this as a parent who has visited UA, my kid has UA as her safety, is already in with the honors dept and has the presidential.

So I’m obviously a pro-UA parent, but the way you’re presenting it makes it feel kind of smarmy-wording like “can free you to do anything you want”. Not cool.

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@MotherOfDragons

Fair enough… Thanks for pointing out the issue with my tone and didn’t mean to come off that way. I have no affiliation with Alabama.

I think I’m done with this forum thought, not because of this. It’s just I am too disconnected from the college selection world.

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^ then why post at all if you are too disconnected from the college selection process?! This is the most bizarre thread I’ve seen in a long time here on UA’s forum…

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It’s kind of a catch-22. Bama is putting all that money out there to build up their engineering program. A good program has good students, and to attract good students you need to have good students- which is where the scholarships come in.

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@aeromom @MotherOfDragons
In spite of my tone, I’m don’t believe I’ve ever said anything inaccurate on CC as a whole. I again apologize for my tone. What I wanted to say is that engineering recruiting outside of the top 20 is largely regional and that Alabama one of the few guaranteed merit schools that doesn’t seriously limit your options in the future. It is probably not the best choice for an MIT caliber student, but there is something valuable to be said about freedom from debt (given sufficient stats).

As always, I suggest comparing your options. If you are independently wealthy or can get into and afford a engineering school like RPI, MIT, Stanford, Michigan, Purdue, Cornell, Northwestern, UTexas, or Penn State without much debt (I would say < 30,000 for Engineering), then these options are worth considering over Alabama. These schools attract more national recruiters and nationally known researchers and are more rigorous. Academia is fairly prestige conscious, but not even MIT will turn their nose down on someone who excelled at Alabama and took advantage of all the opportunities offered to them. Of course, the expected trajectory at Alabama is lower than MIT and over a 40 year long career, this may matter more than marginal debt you are taking on.

While engineers are paid well and can pay off their loans with relative ease (relative to other majors), lots of kids wash out of engineering and are stuck with a lot of debt. Of course, this is a potential issue at Alabama too, as the Engineering scholarships don’t carry over to other programs.

Alabama is a school that genuinely intrigued me because of various dimensions
(1) high 75th percentile ACT (31), indicating strong students
(2) nationally ranked research university
(3) lots of academic merit scholarships
(4) a unique football culture (this may be a pro or a con depending on your preference)

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Also, I graduate from engineering school magna cum laude and in Tau Beta Pi. I work in software on the west coast and have many friends who are practicing engineers. I’m familiar with the general landscape of engineering and where companies (certainly at least my company) hires. I’ve never worked with anyone from Alabama, but I’ve worked with people from UGA, UIC (Illinois - Chicago), and other schools with similar reputations as Alabama.

There is no discrimination against Alabama grads in industry, specifically in software. You’re good as long as you’ve done well in school and had internship experience in your field. If a company doesn’t recruit at your school, if you submit your resume, they will screen you over the phone and if they think you are good, you will be invited onsite.

It’s a bit odd that I’m boosting Alabama, but I can vouch that I’m not paid by or affiliated in any way with Alabama (LOL!). I wouldn’t have minded going to Alabama on a full scholarship though and if I had kids, I wouldn’t mind sending them to Alabama either (more likely if they qualify for the Presidential Scholarship (-:).

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The more you write the weirder it gets.

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@MotherOfDragons

I avoid making hard claims outside of engineering, where I have a background. I substanciate my claims. I don’t need to prove anything to you and don’t care about your problems.

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I’m with @MotherOfDragons …

Why are you bragging about Alabama if you:

  1. Didn't go to the school
  2. Don't have any first hand experience with Alabama grads?

How can you comment on the rigor of engineering at Alabama without having gone to Alabama’s engineering?

Also, why have you done so much research into Alabama without children and already having a degree in engineering?

If you’re wondering why people are skeptical of what you’re saying, this is why^^^

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Delightful.

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Looks like nobody wants to talk about actual engineering here… oh well (-;, can’t say I’m actually surprised.

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@Jpgranier

I studied EE. I’m familiar with the curriculum, various textbooks in the field, and the difficulty of topics. Google the curricula of some core courses at any school and you can easily get an idea of the rigor of the school. Most schools publish their curricula so that employers and graduate schools who are unfamiliar can evaluate the program. This is what graduate schools to evaluate universities they are not familiar with. Obviously, the graduate committee has not taken exams at every university (-;. My evaluation was obviously fairly coarse-grained.

People make evaluations about things they are unfamiliar with all the time. I interview candidates and have to screen through resumes. To deal with possible bias and imperfection of evaluations, candidates usually go through multiple rounds of interviews.

It’s really simple. Hope that answers your questions.