<p>I saw the other thread and figured another perspective could never hurt. I don't feel like going through the other thread to find unanswered questions but I'll happily field new ones here. </p>
<p>A couple details about myself- male, junior, in Pratt but most likely pursuing non-engineering career, on sports team, haven't studied abroad.</p>
<p>How do you like engineering at Duke? Are the classes rigorous? I’m probably going to pursue electrical and computer engineering. Do you have any comments on that major? Thanks! (:</p>
<p>The courses are definitely rigorous but they won’t be easy anywhere that you go. I haven’t found most of the material covered very interesting but it has definitely paid off because engineers seem to have the easiest time finding a job and internships. One complaint I have about the engineering department is a lot of professors are better at research than they are at teaching. The few that are professors of the practice (only teach) are clearly better than the ones who do a lot of research.</p>
<p>ECE is probably the highest paying major on campus. You also only need 4 additional classes to complete an ECE/comp sci double major. There’s a lot of companies recruiting on campus for these kinds of jobs- more than for BME/ME/CEE.</p>
<p>Reposting from the other thread</p>
<p>I just came back home to California after doing a series of
college tours on the East Coast over spring break. I visited
UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Boston
College, and Columbia.</p>
<p>Duke and Princeton were my favorites out of those visits.
Duke seemed to be THE perfect fit for me and I loved the
atmosphere as well as the campus. And the people were
so nice! However, the one qualm I have about it is its lack
of proximity to large cities. I’m a large-city kind of guy, and
after visiting Boston and New York on the trip I would like
to be able to spend lots of time there. Princeton, while
more suburban/rural, is only about an hour away from
New York and Harvard is right in Boston.</p>
<p>How common is it for Duke students to do like a weekend
trip to a big city and would it be too difficult a feat to
attempt this?</p>
<p>I also have close family in Briarcliff Manor and Greenwich,
so it would be nice to be close to them. The only family I
have even mildly close to Durham is in Atlanta.</p>
<p>Also, what sport do you play? If I attend, I would most likely play club volleyball since duke doesn’t have a varsity team for men.</p>
<p>And is it possible to blend majors like Harvard does? I would be interested in blending computer science and neuroscience to major in computational neuroscience. Or is that just Program 2?</p>
<p>biovball: Glad to hear you enjoyed your visit. Funny that you should ask the question about visiting major cities, as I was talking to a friend of mine today about her visit to NYC this past weekend. She left Friday early afternoon and got back Sunday evening and it’s not like she’ll need to be up all night doing homework to make up for it. I’m planning on flying up to Boston the weekend after next to watch the Boston Marathon (if that doesn’t give it away, I run track). People don’t do it a lot but it’s definitely doable. </p>
<p>Some of the club sports are pretty legit. All it takes is one rich donor and that sport will get hooked up. Every club sport gets to go on a trip somewhere cool once every four years, so you’d be able to do it once while you’re here.</p>
<p>I haven’t heard of “blending” majors, but it’s pretty common for people to double major or at least have a minor outside of their major.</p>
<p>What exactly do you mean by hooked up? Like better equipment? Is the coaching on par with varsity coaches?</p>
<p>Yeah some nice gear or equipment (as far as club sports go) and maybe traveling. Ice hockey comes to mind, they had a kid on the team whose dad was in the NHL.</p>
<p>I don’t know who coaches the club sports but there’s no way they’re on par with varsity coaches who coach for a living.</p>
<p>@bustercherry Thanks, and that’s relieving that you don’t seem to have issues with traveling to the city from Duke.</p>
<p>Thanks for your time Buster. Based on your comments it seems that you are also an ECE major! I definitely want to double major if I pursue ECE, and computer science is definitely an option (thinking econ as another possibility as an opportunity for additional $$$ :D, or even BME). Just curious - why are you no longer pursuing an engineering career?</p>
<p>I’m actually not an ECE- just know that from talking to people and going to recruiting events. The BME/ECE double requires overloading (5 classes instead of 4) some semesters. You can check out the recommended schedule for that here:
[url=<a href=“http://www.bme.duke.edu/undergrad/curriculum]Curriculum”>http://www.bme.duke.edu/undergrad/curriculum]Curriculum</a> & Advising | Duke Biomedical Engineering Department<a href=“click%20on%20the%20link%20at%20the%20bottom”>/url</a></p>
<p>One of my professors said after graduation 1/3 of engineering students go into an engineering job, 1/3 go to grad school, and 1/3 go into a non-engineering career. It’s a popular thing to do at Duke and a lot of non-engineering employers come to the engineering on-campus recruiting event (TechConnect).</p>
<p>So glad I found this semi-recent thread. This isn’t completely relevant, but can anyone comment on the advantages of Duke ECE over other universities? I’m trying to decide between Berkeley EECS and Duke ECE. I was awarded the Regents Scholarship at Berkeley, and that’s a huge incentive, but I’d love to get out of California and experience Duke.</p>
<p>I’m not ECE so can’t compare Duke versus other schools. However I can give a list of companies that recruit on campus so you can get an idea of the job opportunities you may have coming out of Duke. Here’s the list from the two TechConnect events this year- TechConnect is an engineering and comp sci networking/recruiting event on campus.</p>
<p>Spring 2013: [inDuke</a> TechConnect 2013 Spring](<a href=“http://www.cs.duke.edu/induke/techconnect/2013_spring/companies.php]inDuke”>http://www.cs.duke.edu/induke/techconnect/2013_spring/companies.php)</p>
<p>List from Fall 2013 (couldn’t find the website, have this from my own records):
Accenture
Appian
Bank of America
Bloomberg
Belvedere Trading
Bronto Software
Capital One
CarMax
Catalent
Cisco
Comscore
Cvent
Deloitte
Deutsche
Facebook
Google
Humana
Jane Street
Maximus
Microsoft
MPR
NetApp
Optiver
Plumfare
PWC
Qualcomm
RedHat
Sapient
SciMed
Tata
Parthenon Group
Veolia
Vmware
Zynga
Yahoo</p>
<p>1)Which other colleges were you accepted but turned down to attend Duke?
2)Why did you choose Duke?
3)As a freshman. what were the challenges you had to overcome or yet to overcome?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance</p>
<ol>
<li><p>NC State and Oklahoma State. Bet that’s not what you expected to hear haha.</p></li>
<li><p>A couple reasons:</p></li>
<li><p>Obviously academics and having a good engineering program. Nothing in particular about it, just knowing they’re good.
-Track team. Liked the people on the team, liked the coach, felt like I could contribute to the program. I also wouldn’t be attending if not for an athletic scholarship.
-I like campus atmosphere. Not just that it looks nice, but that everyone stays on campus 3 years and it’s not a college that just shuts down on the weekends. There’s a real sense of community and I got that impression on my visit.
-Location. It’s nice being able to drive home when I need to.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Athletics was a bigger part of my decision than most people on here. There’s only so many places that have top engineering programs and top running teams.</p>
<ol>
<li>-Study habits. I cruised through high school and had to learn good study. It wasn’t that I didn’t manage my time well, I just didn’t understand how much work was actually “enough” for tests.
-Socially it can be hard not knowing anyone coming in. This was easier since I mostly hung out with teammates, but some people seem to struggle not having any good friends that know you well. This isn’t unique to Duke though, and orientation week is great for getting to know people.</li>
</ol>
<p>Hey buster,</p>
<p>Thanks for taking the time to do answer all these questions. </p>
<p>You mentioned you were most likely pursuing a non-engineering career. Like you, I was accepted to Pratt but I am probably going to pursue a career in consulting or finance. How can the opportunities at Duke help me achieve that goal (internships, research, etc)? I would like to hear your experiences with internships and such.</p>
<p>Prestige of your school is a huge factor on Wall Street, so Duke is considered a top target school. Also in that group are the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, maybe Caltech/Michigan/Chicago too- wallstreetoasis.com is a good resource to look into that.</p>
<p>There’s a large alumni network at pretty much every firm and they all recruit here. And like you can see from the list above, some come specifically to the engineering recruiting event. MBB (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) recruit at Duke, as well as others such as Accenture, APT, Capital One. </p>
<p>The career center also has services that can help such as practice interviews, resume reviews, career advising, etc.</p>
<p>There’s certainly opportunities here to do research, but that would be more important for an engineering job that consulting/finance. Research certainly doesn’t hurt, but it wouldn’t be any better than other extracurriculars you were involved in. </p>
<p>Last summer I interned in more of an engineering job and only got interested in non-engineering jobs last semester. The place I’m interning this summer (one of the companies in the list TechConnect list above) has a large Duke network and said that Duke students do the best in the final round interviews of any school. They also offer full-time jobs to ~90% of summer interns.</p>
<p>Hey thanks a lot man. I was poking around the Wallstreetoasis Link you provided and I saw someone say that I should be sure to join the various finance competitions at Duke - do you know anything about these?</p>
<p>No I don’t. I’ve heard of consulting companies doing case competitions but don’t know of finance-specific ones.</p>
<p>Hi Buster, My son too is a student athlete and accepted to pratt.
I wanted to know with all the practices and meets how difficult or easy is it to cope with the rigors of studying engineering at Duke and do you get any special privileges or support academically, being on the team?</p>
<p>What sport is your son playing? And it’s really all about time management- knowing there’s days you’re going to spend basically the entire day either working or doing your sport. Teachers have always been understanding about missing class and making up assignments/tests. There’s 1-2 afternoon labs every semester so it helps to have an understanding coach if your team has afternoon practice.</p>
<p>Athletes get free tutoring in the K Center (which your son probably saw on his visit) and there’s a full-time tutor for engineers that used to work at Boeing, so he’s very helpful.</p>