<p>I was wondering which school has the best engineering program for electrical and mechanical engineering? I know that Tufts and BU is far more prestigious than WPI and NEU, but NEU has the #1 co-op program in the country and they have been improving their engineering programs a lot over the last ten years. On the other hand WPI has one of the best engineering programs in the country. </p>
<p>So, my question to you all the CC-ers, if you were to rank those schools engineering programs, how would you rank them? (rank academics first and then rank social life, sports, etc differently if you want)</p>
<p>People view out of curiosity. You didn’t put “engineering” in the thread title; a lot of people don’t know about engineering. Be a little patient. More people post on weekdays than on weekends.</p>
<p>First, the programs you list are vastly different. What is your interest? Engineering ranges from civil to mechanical to electrical and computer to polymer to biomed, etc. You can’t just say x has a better department without thinking about the department within the department. </p>
<p>Second, WPI is different from the others because it’s solely a tech school. You should read their website and see if their teaching methods - which are different than most schools - fit what you want. </p>
<p>As you see, BU gets a lot more external grant funding, which reflects the fact that it’s overall a significantly more important research institution - got $335M last year in total external grant funding compared to Tufts’ $165M (I think) and Northeastern’s $40M. But you can see that BU gets most of its outside funding in a few areas and these may not be the ones you’re interested in. I am always surprised that WPI, which is certainly a good program and is only engineering, doesn’t get more external funding. </p>
<p>You should also consider the basic fact that if you’re considering these 4 schools then it’s likely Tufts is a reach for you. (Tufts and Northeastern don’t usually appear in the same sentence so if you’re considering the latter …) The way that admissions runs now Tufts has become quite difficult to get in. You should see if your high school participates - perhaps through its guidance department - in the naviance system that tracks applications and admissions from your high school to schools. (The system is more popular outside MA.) You could then see the grades and scores of all the applications and admits / rejects to each school. </p>
<p>I’m serious when I talk about differences in teaching, btw. All engineering programs require a lot of work. WPI has a fairly unique approach. I know some of the engineering faculty at Northeastern - and like them personally - but I believe they see their program as essentially traditional. BU and Tufts are more aspirational in approach and thus are more interested in connecting undergrads with the university research mission.</p>
<p>^ Thank you for the links. As I mentioned on my post, I am mostly interested in Electrical (including computer) engineering and mechanical engineering. How would you rate the engineering programs of those schools?</p>
<p>When it comes to EE, you should look to see which department you feel best with. Read what they have to say, what kind of research they do in that area and see where you get in. That’s not a specialty, like polymer or biomed, and all the schools I’m sure teach it well.</p>
<p>Please stop boasting BU as a research power house. It is a great school but the reason they have a lot of funding for one, they have a med school and more graduate programs than BC or NEU and two, they have double the faculty of NEU and almost triple of BC. Stop being bias! and offer clearer reasoning.</p>
<p>I’m glad to hear about the Northeastern / Tufts thing, but getting into Tufts is much, much harder than getting into Northeastern or BU. Read my post again. The guy is thinking about Northeastern, WPI, BU and Tufts. Of those, Tufts is by far the hardest to get into. Not an arguable point.</p>
<p>The simple fact is that Northeastern is not a big research school. Given its size, medical school or not, they don’t get much funding. Tufts also has a medical school, which is one reason why it receives something like $165M in funding, but BU’s engineering department gets nearly as much funding as all of Northeastern. (The Northeastern number I got from their website earlier this year. I haven’t tracked it down from other sources.) </p>
<p>I don’t understand defensive reactions. BU is in the top tier of research institutions. Period. It is not one of the top research schools - you’d need above $500M to get in that group. I never said anything different. </p>
<p>Northeastern is a large school, a few thousand fewer than BU, and also has a large graduate program - though BU has about twice as many grad students. I find it odd that BU would have double Northeastern’s faculty. I can understand the difference versus BC because it is both significantly smaller and has fewer grad students. </p>
<p>Why do Northeastern students come to the BU forum so often?</p>
<p>^LOL, Lergnom, I have no idea why NEU students/fans come to BU forums but it’s almost always to post something negative or derogatory about BU.</p>
<p>Anyway, I agree that Tufts is a much much harder school to get into. I got accepted to both Northeastern and BU (Northeastern with a scholarship, not as much at BU) but not Tufts. Also, besides looking at engineering all four of those schools are vastly different. For example, WPI is suburban, smaller, vastly dominated by males, and mainly has engineering majors whereas BU is much more diverse, bigger, and right in the city. All of those schools offer great engineering programs (sure, one may be slightly better than the other) however, each school is very different so it’s important to look at that as well.</p>
<p>btw the link that superstar posted is an early akkeptanke (key is broken so have to use k’s) to tufts med. we were talking about undergraduate and many skhools have early akkeptanke opportunities to med skhools. for example, bu has early akkeptanke to bu med and umdnj. that wasn’t what this forum was about though, it has to do with engineering, and lerg was pointing out that it is way more diffikult to get into tufts UNDERGRAD than northeastern UNDERGRAD and has nothing to do with links with the med skhool.</p>
<p>I am a WPI student who have friends at BU and NEU. I simply went on Wikipedia to look at number of faculty per school. Just offering an alternative view point. BU has double the faculty relative to NEU just thought i would point that out. To the OP i personally think if you want pure tech come to WPI…that is of course if you think you can handle the work. 6 classes per semester broken out into terms…also stop getting so defensive, Lerg was pointing out NEU and Tufts never get mentioned in the same sentence so i pointed something out. Also i wanted to reason why BU gets more funding relative to the other schools. There is no evidence where i suggested that NEU was harder to get into than Tufts lol…im also familiar with BU’s engineering program so chill.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of your replies. I got accepted to both BU and WPI, but since I wasn’t sure about whether I want to do engineering or not, I denied both schools and decided to attend BC. Now I want to do engineering and just to keep my options open I wanted to put this thread up. So far haven’t got that much helpful info/comparison about which school would be better (for electrical with computer and mechanical engineering) which is making me sad:(</p>
<p>So, if you guys could please focus more on actual purpose of the thread and compare those four schools I mentioned, that would be much appreciated.</p>
<p>my bf’s brother was choosing between bu honors and wpi and decided on wpi because of the environment he was looking for. as far as i know bc does not have an engineering program or one that is renowned, but i’m also not that familiar with bc. it’s a shame that u wanted to do engineering but didn’t choose either wpi or bu because both are excellent as far as engineering is concerned.</p>
<p>academically (and this is just my opinion of course, got another keyboard for my c key btw lol): WPI>BU>NEU>Tufts
my bf just graduated bu mechanical engineering as well as a lot of my friends and even with the recession their opportunities are endless.</p>
<p>social life: BU>NEU>Tufts>WPI
Sports: BU>NEU>Tufts>Wpi (NEU also has football but our hockey program is da bomb!!!)
location: BU>NEU>Tufts>Wpi</p>
<p>^the bias coming from the post above mine should make that post completely null and void. </p>
<p>First, the engineering programs at bu/NU (northeastern is one word boys and girls)/WPI is pretty much on the same level, you can split hairs about it and make an argument for one or the other but in the end an employer will look upon all of them as more or less equal unless he or she is an alumni of one of the aforementioned. That being said, CO-OP gives the overall resume of an engineering graduate from one of these institutions an edge in my opinionas it gives you 1.5 years of work experience on top of a solid education on more or less par with WPI and bu. </p>
<p>As far as sports go, it’s clear that bu and NU have better athletic programs than WPI, if you like hockey games you’re going to enjoy yourself at either school, though a packed Matthews Arena is hard to beat in terms of an overall college sports atmosphere. The hoops teams for both of these schools are vastly overshadowed by their hockey programs and as a result attendance at these games is scarce, even though each has a respectable mid-tier D1 team.</p>
<p>As far as location, you have very similar locations in bu and NU, they are both in Boston, though bu does stretch farther outside of boston towards Newton. WPI is located in Worcester, which if you don’t know is your typical smaller sized city, there is an AHL affiliate team that plays at the DCU center (The Woostah shahks). Boston has a lot more to offer as far as more things to do, both schools are located in relatively safe areas, but like any big city don’t go out alone at night in sketchy areas. </p>
<p>Hope that helps.</p>
<p>EDIT: Just saw you chose to attend BC, so I hope this helps someone in a similar situation.</p>
<p>AliAngel: " academically (and this is just my opinion of course, got another keyboard for my c key btw lol): WPI>BU>NEU>Tufts" </p>
<p>Really? Tufts at the bottom of the list?? I mean Tufts, if not Harvard, it’s almost on the same caliber as Harvard. Why it’s at the bottom of the list??</p>
<p>srb2006, you asked everyone to rank those schools in their opinion, and you asked us to rank academically based on ENGINEERING which is what i did. i have never heard of tufts engineering (they may have an excellent one, i don’t know, never heard of it) which is why i ranked the ones that i knew of. and i have said in hundreds of posts, optisrule, that i, like nearly everyone posting in this forum, am biased towards BU. i have had the time of my life at bu, which is why i ranked it above and beyond socially, athletically, and in terms of location. so i apologize if i am not u.s. news and am not giving you the criteria you are looking for. for those of you who feel this way, seriously stop asking for our opinions because when we give them we get ridiculous responses like “how could you POSSIBLY think that x is better than y? the bias here should make this null and void.” so here’s a lesson in subjectivity and objectivity: if you want an objective opinion, hire a college counselor who is not an alum of one of the schools you wish to attend. if you want a SUBJECTIVE opinion from a student of BU, who has been there for 4 years and is continuing for another 4, then post on CC. so optisrule, since i have not criticized your opinion of these 4 schools at all and believe everyone is entitled to their beliefs, i wish that you would take this post into consideration and stop criticizing people based on how they feel. srb2006 was looking for the opinions of BU students, otherwise he wouldn’t have posted here.</p>
<p>The fact is none of us can say which of these places is better socially speaking, that is what you make it. You can’t say that you are going to have a better social experience at this place versus this place. Nobody can, that was my main beef with your post.</p>