Caltech is small.
Whoops. Meant to respond to @momoftheyear
CMU and Stanford are both relatively small too. One would be remiss for not at least looking at them and Caltech for CS.
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Just looking at 2020 stats for Cal Poly engineering specific…
“That’s particularly true for the College of Engineering, which accepted 5,196 potential first-time freshman out of 17,540 who applied. The average GPA of engineering students selected is 4.15 with an average SAT of 1440.”
The OP appears extremely well qualified with 100 point cushion to the average SAT score and a competitive GPA and an acceptance rate approaching 30%.
SAT score will not matter (test blind).
All A grades will certainly help. GPA is calculated as described at GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub , except that CPSLO includes 9th grade courses/grades, and all CSUs double count college courses/grades (i.e. one semester college course counts as two courses with two grades).
If the student applies, be sure to include on the application all math (algebra 1 and higher) and foreign language courses, including those taken before high school, to ensure proper counting for the bonus points that CPSLO adds for math and foreign language beyond the minimum.
Here is a reverse-engineered older version of CPSLO’s admission formula (before test-blind): https://mca.netlify.app/ . It can be used to see what non-SAT/ACT criteria are used. Unfortunately, historical thresholds are not published or available.
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Would student’s being OOS help or hurt his application to SLO? I know UC’s are supposed to start cutting down on out-of-state/int’l, but wasn’t sure if that was true for CSU’s? Or does it help since he’d be paying higher tuition?
Would you consider WPI to have this same learn by doing approach that is better suited for students who are already tinkerers? I assumed all engineering programs were like that but perhaps some more than others?
The tinkering dichotomy is interesting to me, as my son is not a tinkerer, but drawn to WPI and other small-ish “hands on” schools. A friend of ours was saying it was very difficult for students without experience in building things to acclimate, as the assumption is that people come in with basic hands on experience in schools like that.
Does that ring true to people? A lot of the schools mentioned here are on his list.
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I could go either way. Cal Poly limits their OOS enrollment to 15%, but hasn’t said that they keep that ratio from college to college or major to major. Applicants are assessed in separate pools in state and out of state.
I can’t speak for anyone but my son, but he wasn’t a tinkerer at all (other than he loved Legos as a kid) and CP and WPI were the schools that attracted him the most.
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My D specifically targeted schools with a heavy hands on component and first year design. I would not call her a tinkerer but she had lots of build experience with science Olympiad, robotics, and engineering summer programs.
First week of school there were training session in the shops to get kids trained on equipment and on safety.
IMO this wouldn’t be on my list of worries.
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I’m not familiar with WPI so I can’t say what their engineering pedagogy looks like. Most classic engineering programs are theory heavy in the first couple of years and design and lab heavy the last couple. There are engineering programs that like to throw the student right into design and lab work from the very beginning: design a mechanism to help a person in a wheelchair lower themselves into a bath, learn how to weld etc. the idea being to expose the student to the wide array of problems an engineer is called to solve. For students without tinkering experience this dive in the deep can be a bit much. I think I had two labs my first year: chemistry and crystallography. As the years progressed and we developed mastery of the math, physics etc. more labs were required. I think each student needs to look at the teaching philosophy of the engineering programs they are considering and see what suits them best. I ended up pursuing a graduate degree in applied science and the theoretical foundation I had from a more traditional engineering curriculum was invaluable. I am an experimental scientist, however, and without my lab techs (one of them a CalPoly grad) I would not be able to do the work I do. It takes birds of all feathers.
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According to the Cal Poly projections page the actual numbers for CS for the last admitted class were 5050 applicants for 170 slots.
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I have experience of students not doing well in hands-on engineering schools and transferring to more “traditional” engineering programs and vice-versa. My neighbor’s son who is a first year engineering student at CalPoly and loving it sent her a picture of the bookends he made in the machine shop for one of his classes. I do not love machine shops so for me that would not have been a great class. But I love good machinists and very much appreciate their excellent work!
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When our son was touring, I asked the Chairman of the ME Department why they still taught a traditional course like welding (officially Materials Joining), since is almost never taught in engineering or Architecture anymore. His answer was interesting. He said by teaching our students how things are fabricated, they don’t design things that can’t be built.
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I hate welding but can tell you a lot about the microstructure around the weld and how to optimize welding parameters for mechanical properties. Again it takes birds of all feathers.
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We’re kind of off track from CS, but that’s the thrust of the course (from the course catalog: Theory and application of metal cutting and welding processes. Includes shielded metal arc, flux cored arc, submerged arc, gas metal arc, gas tungsten arc, brazing, resistance, and oxy-acetylene processes. Bonding theory, joint design, codes and testing. Introduction to adhesive bonding. Open to all majors. 1 lecture, 1 laboratory.). It isn’t to teach welding competency. They only do one lab on each methodology. Most schools do not have the lab component, but the subtle point of the lab is to know the size of the equipment and how it’s operated, so welds that can’t be physically made aren’t spec’d.
Since the OP asked about hand on experience in CS, at most schools that happens in the form of labs, internships, jobs and clubs. That’s fairly common across all CS programs big and small.
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This is great info for @chrisntine and @CateCAParent (I think it was these two) that were asking about the hands on engineering curricula. The OP as well! Good luck with your search. There are a lot of options and I feel confident that your kid will find something that suits them.
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UT Austin, the Turing program is worth a look. The program is small and personalized within the obviously much larger university.
UT will have plenty of opportunities. Turing scholars have excellent track records for getting internships. If he has ap credit, the public schools are more likely to accept it, freeing time for travel and ‘other things’.
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There seems to be a tendency to treat engineering and computer science (emphasis on science) as if they were nearly the same. Tinkering is a necessary ingredient in engineering and experimental sciences. Machine shop training (and 3D printing, its modern version) is very helpful for an aspiring engineer or experimental scientist. However, other than for some roboticists, tinkering isn’t what computer scientists generally do, unless by “tinkering” one means that they “tinker” with their programs. If that’s the case, mathematicians and theoretical physicists also “tinker”: they “tinker” with their formulae.
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Have you considered an Honors College within a large school? It would feel a bit like a small school, and would allow for travel.
See for example Travel Abroad | Barrett, The Honors College (asu.edu)
That sidebar was generated by a couple of posters’ questions regarding engineering, not CS.