I’m currently a junior in high school, and we’re getting our college lists together so we can start our applications. I’m thinking about major in aero/astro, mechanical, or nuclear engineering. I did one of those college search/match things and there were hundreds of colleges, so I wanna know: Which colleges have the best aero/astro program? Mechanical engineering program? Nuclear engineering program?
When I mean best I mean like which ones have the most undergrads that get a job in that field after graduating, which ones have a lot of internship or co-op oppurtunities, or special programs like honors or 5 year programs, and which ones have good faculty.
Pretty much any ABET-accredited program is going to have good placement rates and internship/co-op opportunities. The bottom line is you will have to try to find some less general criteria to make your decision. What is your price range? Where do you live? Do you prefer public or private? Big or small? Where do you want to work after college? These sorts of questions should help you narrow down your list a little more.
The top 22 schools with ABET-accredited nuclear engineering, in alphabetical order:
Air Force Institute of Technology >
Georgia Institute of Technology >
Idaho State University >
Massachusetts Institute of Technology >
Missouri University of Science and Technology (Formerly Missouri University of Science and Technology) >
North Carolina State University at Raleigh >
Oregon State University >
Pennsylvania State University >
Purdue University at West Lafayette >
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute >
South Carolina State University >
Texas A&M University >
United States Military Academy >
University of California, Berkeley >
University of Florida >
University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign >
University of Massachusetts Lowell (Formerly University of Massachusetts Lowell) >
University of Michigan >
University of New Mexico >
University of Tennessee at Knoxville >
University of Wisconsin - Madison >
Virginia Commonwealth University >
@boneh3ad I dont really care about most of that stuff except the price range, which I’ll probably consider after I get a smaller list (from hundreds down to like 20 or so) I care more about which school has had their program established for longer and has a higher output of graduates who get jobs. Also, I want the school I go to to have a 5 year BS/MS program.
Well, like I said, nearly every ABET-accredited program will have very similar placement rates. The real question is where they are placing them (which companies and what region of the country/world). Also, very many schools have 5-year BS/MS programs these days, so that isn’t going to do much to help you narrow it down.
Well, if ABET-accredited nuclear engineering is a must-have, that trims the list to the top 22 schools listed in reply #2.
Since there are also relatively few ABET-accredited aerospace programs, you could limit you search to those that have both NE and AE. They all have ME too. That list is as follows:
Georgia Tech
MIT
Missouri S&T
NC State
Penn State
Purdue
RPI
Texas A&M
Florida
Illinois
Michigan
Tennessee
Every ABET school will likely meet all the criteria that you’ve laid out, so as @boneh3ad alluded to, other criteria are important too, particularly where you wasn’t to work after. Most graduates tend to cluster fairly close to where they went to school. That’s even true for the very well known programs like Illinois, GT, Michigan, et. al. The exception is probably MIT. Also, what about weather? It’s hard to conceive how cold places like Ann Arbor and Troy can get. Lastly, what about hobbies? College is more than just academics. Are you knot big time college sports? Lots of schools on the list have them. These are all just food for thought. Only you can decide what’s important.
Then you can also take the list in #6 and consider how difficult it is to get into or change major to one of your desired majors at each school. For examples, some of the schools on the list admit to first year pre-engineering; students must meet a GPA threshold or enter a competitive admission process to get into their majors. Others admit directly to the major, but may be difficult to change major at, since the only space available is that opened by attrition. A few have sufficient space in all majors to allow all students to freely choose their majors. The latter is obviously desirable if you are not sure of which major you want to do when you apply to college.
There are so many other factors involved in choosing a college, some of which are pointed out in the previous post. But the biggest factor in getting an internship during college and a job afterward is YOU. A “good” school and poor GPA will leave you out in the cold. A decent school and a great GPA will help a lot with your goals.
Working with professors and such will give you good references, which are also a great help. You’ll find that in college the emphasis is the student going out and making things happen where in high school opportunities would sometimes coming looking for you. So, again, it comes down to YOU doing things to help yourself.
You have time to look around, visit some colleges, see where you feel most comfortable. Try visiting when school is in session to get a better feel of what the students are doing rather than just what a sterile campus without students looks like.
Ok so for aerospace engineering, I hear that Maryland has a “good” program for it, but I haven’t been able to find out why. What makes maryland’s program better than others?
Also Im looking at nuclear and aerospace engineering separately, I want a college list for each major then I’ll decide which college to go to depending on what college is on each list.
There are more aero schools than nuclear, but still not many. Go to abet.org and you can do a search to find them all.
Beyond that no one is going to be able to narrow a list with the limited criteria you’ve laid out. Yes, Maryland has a good aero program, but so do lots of others. The ONLY way to natron is if you provide more criteria (weather, hobbies, rural/urban/suburban, proximity to home, others that I haven’t even thought of that are important to YOU, etc.). The issue is, “what’s better?” is completely subjective. In order to be best for you, you need to set the search parameters.
That really depends on who you ask. There is no truly objective means for ranking programs, and basically all sets of rankings use some mixture of subjective and objective criteria to try to come up with a ranking, but all are flawed in one way or another. Many times, the most important factor is a programs reputations. In some ways that is useful, as it tends to average out the varied criteria that different humans use to decide which programs are the best in their opinion, and comes with some average best, but it is still just based on reputation.
For a school like Maryland, that reputation generally derives from the fairly well-known companies that recruit there combined with the quality research that comes from its faculty (which may or may not translate into undergraduate education).
Then I suggest you go to ABET’s website and look up the list of accredited schools in each field on your own. That’s really more of your responsibility than ours. Despite that, several people have provided similar lists. The purpose of the above list of schools that offer both degrees was so that you could look at schools that have both in case you haven’t made up your mind between them yet.