<p>My final decision comes down to University of Pittsburgh and Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>Georgia Tech - 35th in nation, 2nd in biomedical engineering
U Pitt - 58th in nation, 9th in biomedical engineering, guaranteed admission to grad school for incumbents (their medical school is ranked 13th)</p>
<p>As you can see I'm interested in biomedical engineering, but I just cannot seem to decide between these two schools. In hindsight, one might say that Georgia Tech is far far better, however, out of all the reviews and interviews I have read and listened to, only about 2/5 of them are positive and this began to worry me.</p>
<p>I know GT is much better in biomed engineering, but there are things that I also care about that GT does not seem to posses.</p>
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<li><p>I hear that GT is unnecessarily difficult to the point where the workload is ridiculously high. Reviews say that people rarely have enough time to have fun and hang out and half the professors cant speak English and care only about research so you have to teach yourself. </p></li>
<li><p>I looked up the guy - girl ratio and saw that it is one of the worst in the nation (3:1). Now, I know that this is a superficial thing to worry about but when I'm possibly going to spend the next 5 years of my life in a place and pay buttloads of money to go there, I want that place to be nice the way I want it.</p></li>
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<p>3.Social Life. This is related to number 1. Most students seem to complain that due to the excessive unneeded workload, they don't have time to hang out and have fun, and even if they do, they rarely do.</p>
<p>When it comes to U Pitt however, social life and workload DO NOT seem to be a problem at all. On top of that, it's in the top 10 biomedical engineering list, so its not that far away from GT at all, without all the drawbacks I listed above.</p>
<p>Can someone give me input in this? I really am in a deadlock. Should I go with high ranking to earn a little more in the future or should I go a little lower (still pretty high in my opinion) and have a more complete college experience.</p>
<p>Plus: Another factor that affects me: I'm 1.5 hours away from Pittsburgh (I drive there).</p>
<p>Can some of the current students give me input and their personal views about the three points about GT I mentioned? I wanna see what other students think so I can help make a decision. I mean, I would totally go to GT without question if I didn't worry about working 24/7 and having severely limited time to do anything (such as hang out and socialize). I want to have a balance of the two (college life and quality education).</p>
<p>This is patently false. Georgia Tech has a rigorous curriculum and engineering is certainly no walk in the park, but good time management will allow most students to spend plenty of time pursuing extracurricular activities AND hang out with friends without negatively impacting their grades. Unlike many schools, Georgia Tech is predominantly composed of engineering and science majors, and this tends to artificially inflate the reputation of our workload. If Pitt was almost entirely engineering and science majors, I suspect you would see a similar reputation about “ridiculous” rigor develop. Engineering is going to be challenging at any ranked engineering school, and Pitt is certainly no exception to this. To date, I have never had a professor I could not easily understand, but we do have a handful of professors who have very strong accents(I imagine Pitt does as well). To some extent, these professors can be avoided by getting advice from upperclassmen before registration. Likewise, I have never had a professor that was not willing to help students during office hours and recommend ways to get help if you are struggling in a class. Professors are busy, and they do not always have time to tutor students one on one, but you should have no problem getting advice and assistance from most professors during their scheduled office hours. As always, there are some rotten professors who have less than spectacular dispositions, but they are a small minority and I have been lucky enough to never encounter one. There are also many resources to get help in class. All introductory math, science, and computer science classes have tutors available in the dorms, at OMED, in Skiles or at the CS help desk, and for one-on-one assistance. Additionally, intro math, science, and CS classes have recitations to help you master the material. There is no reason students admitted to Tech should not succeed. Resources and support are readily available and many students work together to help each other on difficult assignments and problem sets.</p>
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<p>3:1? Where did you get that ratio from? Tech currently has about a 2:1 male to female ratio and it is improving yearly. I would not be surprised to see it approach 60:40 over the next five years. I expect your incoming class will be at least 35% female. We also have Emory, Agnes Scott, SCAD, and Georgia State nearby, all of which have majority female populations. Even with the ratio, there are certainly quite a few single women on campus.</p>
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<p>Not true. By and large, I do not find the workload excessive or unnecessary. I take 15-17 hour semesters, was in band, am involved with two campus organizations, and have a volunteer internship on campus for 15 hours a week. I still spend Wednesday evenings and large portions of Friday-Sunday with my friends while maintaining a high GPA. If you manage your time, you will have plenty of time to spend as you like. However, if you hole yourself up in your room with video games and the internet and then have to rush to do your actual work at the last minute (and not sleep) you could find yourself not spending much time with friends and miserable… But this is true no matter where you go.</p>
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<p>Both are great schools and you can have a strong social life at either. You should be deciding based on how well you think you “fit” and perform at each school, not based on the negative reviews of people flunking out of Tech and posting their hatred online. We have a 93% (and rising) retention rate (almost identical to Pitt’s 92.7%), the administration is actively concerned with student experience, and many students love Tech. In fact, we were recently ranked by The Daily Beast as one of the 100 happiest colleges in the nation. Pitt was not ranked in the top 100. Most of the people who post negative reviews did not actually study much at all. They typically spend all their time playing video games and surfing the web and then whine when they flunk their classes and don’t find any friends. Tech isn’t high school; You have to put in the study time, but it isn’t hell either. I personally spend 20-25 hours a week studying and have only made one B so far. </p>
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<p>As I have tried to convey, you can have both at Tech or at Pitt. Don’t let the worst of Tech (a small minority) discourage you from coming here, and don’t let the partying of Pitt’s liberal arts majors make you think that Pitt engineers don’t have it just as tough as Tech engineers. For the undergraduate level the difference in ranking between Tech and Pitt is pretty much irrelevant. That should not be your deciding factor.</p>
<p>You get one chance at your undergraduate years, which in my opinion, are often a lot more than just about classes and lab work. GT is a great school, but it is not “far far better”, especially in biomedical anything. GT is better in engineering. Pitt is better in bio/medical health sciences. Pitt is 5th nationally in NIH funding, GT is around 120th. Go where you’ll be happiest. It sounds like you plan to do grad school anyway, and you can be as selective as you want with where you end up in graduate school…but at that point you’ll probably discover that the labs and faculty at a school is likely more important than any US News ranking. In fact, even for undergrad, I’d suggest investigating the bioengineering research labs at both schools to see if there are ones you’d be most interested in potentially working in, perhaps even contact them, because a lot of your real learning will be conducting original research of your own anyway, even at the undergrad level.</p>
<p>Not sure if you being 1.5 hours from Pittsburgh is a plus or minus. I guess it depends on your desire to go away or be closer to family. I would not plan on commuting to school, if I were you, if that is what you are suggesting. That wouldn’t leave you with any of the social life that you seem to desire.</p>
<p>Thank you for amazingly comprehensive reply.
What you’ve (both of you) typed is probably one of the most meaningful things I’ve read.
I’m leaning towards U Pitt a little more now as a result but GT is still a full possibility.
I guess if I were to go there, I would join a fraternity to take care of the social side of things. Thanks for the input.</p>
<p>@wgmcp101: To be honest, I don’t believe there’s going to much difference between rank 2 and rank 9, I mean they’re both very good schools, and I don’t think the quality is going to differ drastically.
Also, I pointed out 1.5 hours drive as a positive thing, since I can go back home on weekends, hang out with my friends here and see family. I don’t want to be too far from home.</p>
<p>I still got around 36 hours to decide so we’ll see what happens.
I wish UMich hadn’t put me in their waitlist, then I wouldn’t have to face such a dilemma of choosing schools.</p>
<p>QUICK QUESTION: is it possible to deposit tuition at more than one place (Upitt and GT) to secure you’re spot and finally withdraw from one (or both if I get into Umich)?</p>
<p>You are not allowed to pay a deposit at more than one school. If either school were to find out, both schools could rescind admission. However, if you get off the U.Mich wait-list you can withdraw from whichever school you choose and attend U. Mich, but you will likely be out the cost of your admission deposit.</p>
<p>I am not sure why wgmcp101 cited NIH funding as a favor point for UPitt since UPitt has medical school while Ga Tech does not. It just does not make any sense.</p>
<p>However, The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University was created jointly by the Emory University School of Medicine and the Georgia Tech College of Engineering. There is shuttle between Ga Tech and Emory runs daily so students can many opportunities at Emory U if there is any research need.</p>
<p>I don’t know about UPitt biomedical engineering program, but Biomedical Engineering at Tech is elite in the world since it has a new jointed Ph.D program with Peking University, the best university in the China. </p>
<p>Yes, the highest female ratio at Tech engineering school are bioengineering and ISYE.</p>
<p>Workload is definitely “unnecessarily difficult”. Grades are not usually given out on how well you know the material but how much better you know the material than the guy next to you. In order to get decent grades plan on spending 3+ hours a day at least. Although I hear 5 hours is more common and all-nighters as well.</p>
<p>The professors are there to do research, not to teach. From my experiences, professors at Tech have been like bureaucrats- cold, impersonal, and rarely helpful.</p>
<p>Not sure if this is true for every engineering college, but for Tech at least it is.</p>
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<p>The main thing is to not come to Georgia Tech for the girls, because not only are there not very many, but the ones who are there usually aren’t as high on the 1-10 scale as at other colleges. Don’t get me wrong, there are some hotties (usually taken), but the ratio is far far lower than what you would find at UGA or any other college. </p>
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<p>People who come to Georgia Tech have schoolwork as their number one priority, not fun. I think that is the main source of the complaints. There is definitely an emotional vacuum factor.</p>
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<p>From what I’ve heard, no one cares where you went to college 1-2 years out. Unless you want to work in a big bureaucratic corporation for the rest of your life, it doesn’t seem worth it to sacrifice 4 years of hell for your first job.</p>
<p>Most engineering schools (whether within a university or independent engineer schools) are difficult regardless where you go and also most engineering departments have lopsided male female ratio. There is true whether you go to Ga Tech, WPI, RPI or Illionis Engineering or Cornell engineering. If you decide to go to Pitt Engineering, it is going to difficult as well. That’s way it is.</p>
<p>Of course, what schaden said is true about UGA. The most competitive major at UGA is its Undergraduate business major while same undergraduate business major at Tech is general considered one of easier degrees even though UGA business school has similar ranking as Tech’s.</p>
<p>What is your financial aid situation with GT and Pitt? Given that you’re less than two hours away from Pittsburgh, I would guess that you’re a resident of Pennsylvania. Unless GT is offering you substantially better financial aid (ie. lots of grants, no loans), I don’t believe that our higher rank in BME merits the $10,000 / year difference in tuition between Pitt and GT.</p>
<p>Now, about your points…</p>
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<li><p>This depends on the student. GT was a very good “fit” for me academically. I have to study to earn the grades I want, but I don’t have to study all the time. By contrast, I feel that one of my friends is overqualified for GT. In the second semester of our freshman year, he basically played WoW all day every day and still pulled a 3.8 GPA as a ChBE major. I never saw him study, and if he was awake at night, he was playing WoW, not studying.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s 2:1 (~67-33). That’s better than 3:1 (75-25) but still pretty bad. If you’re interested in dating, my advice as a graduating senior is to get a car and get familiar with Emory, Agnes Scott, and Georgia State. I have friends who have girlfriends at Tech, but I have more friends who have found girlfriends elsewhere.</p></li>
<li><p>Total BS. The Greek Sector is always lively on the weekends. Besides, have these complainants ever been to a football game?</p></li>
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<p>There aren’t many BME programs, so a #9 ranking in BME is a lot less impressive than #9 in business. There’s definitely a noticeable bump in difficulty between Pitt and GT, but it’s really not that bad. I know schaden disagrees with me, but I have never been drowning in work unless it was self-inflicted (e.g., going well above and beyond on a project for class). I don’t spend all my time doing work for class either; I put in about 40 hours a week in my lab and also do non-academic things in the evening a few times a week.</p>
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<p>Using your statements then, employers do care where you went to college less than 1-2 years out. A job that you land leveraging your GT education could be the start of a series of better jobs that you get compared to a parallel universe version of yourself who went to Pitt.</p>
<p>I woulda gone with the 60% hotties versus a harder school academically, in hindsight.</p>
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<p>This is true, however I think they released a study that showed people who are accepted to a certain caliber of college and choose a less selective school still earn as much as if they had gone to better college. Of course this can’t be applied directly to GaTech (gatech is less selective) but it’s strong evidence that your individual ability matters more than the school you went to.</p>
<p>Deniz, regarding “since I can go back home on weekends, hang out with my friends here and see family. I don’t want to be too far from home”.</p>
<p>Since you seem concerned about social aspects of college life, I would caution about planning to go home every weekend from school. A huge part of the college experience is going away, meeting new people, and making new friends, and exploring what the city has to offer. I think a lot of students end up meeting a lot of people and bonding with friends on the weekends at college. Now, I’m not saying you have to spend every weekend at school, but I think you’ll miss out on a huge part of your college experience if you don’t spend the majority of your weekends there. It is obviously fine to go visit your friends and family back home, but if you do that all the time you’ll miss out on a lot of the college experience. Make your high school friends road trip to see you, or road trip to see them your new college friends. Trust me, you’ll make a whole new batch of college friends pretty easily before you know it. I think you’ll find that staying on the weekends helps make for an all-around better college experience, and both schools have major sports on the weekends anyway.</p>
<p>“Biomedical Engineering at Tech is elite in the world since it has a new jointed Ph.D program with Peking University, the best university in the China”</p>
<p>Tsinghua U not pleased. You do know that Peking U isn’t even ranked in the top 100 of ARWU? Research at Chinese universities is improving, but it lags quite a bit behind western schools, and even those in democratic Asia. That’s why many Chinese universities are reaching out for western partners because they are playing catch up. Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon University have joint biomedical engineering programs too, does that make them more elite? Georgia Tech may be elite, but not because of an otherwise nice collaborative training program with a university, which admittedly, is probably the most selective in China.</p>
<p>Peking University is comprehensive University (similar to Harvard) while Tsinghua U is engineering school (similar to MIT). For same reason (Harvard vs MIT), Peking is considered the most respected school in China. </p>
<p>“You do know that Peking U isn’t even ranked in the top 100 of ARWU” </p>
<p>That’s why ARWU ranking is a joke. Come on, The ranking has University of Arizona (77) over Emory (100) and Ga Tech (100+) is not worth anything. Time world ranking has Peking rated 23 in the world while QS rated Peking U around 50.</p>
<p>“That’s why many Chinese universities are reaching out for western partners because they are playing catch up”</p>
<p>That maybe true, but Peking University is not setup jointed program with anybody (and I am not talking about foreign exchange program). Have you check Joint degree Peking University offer? They only have jointed degree with top programs at Top schools (Yale U, National Singapore University, etc).</p>
<p>The only other jointed degree I recalled for Ga tech is Industrial engineering (the best program in the world) with National Singapore University and JiaoTong University. In the other words, Ga Tech offer many top ten engineering programs in the US (AE, Computer Science, EE, etc), only BME and ISYE got jointed degree with the elite schools in the world.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for the answers.
I’m much more inclined to go to GTech now. I’ve just phoned with several people from there and they all said that BME was the best engineering major and they’re happy to be where they are.</p>
<p>I might end up going to GT, however going all the way to Georgia still is something that scares me. Its 1000 miles away from where I live, and It scares me a bit now, but I think Ill get used to it. The other thing is, I like for it to snow in the winter and Georgia doesn’t have that. :D</p>
<p>@wgmcp101: you’re right, by my home being only 1.5 hours from Pitt I didn’t mean that I wanted to go home every weekend. It just makes me feel better knowing that I would be living a familiar city, with close proximity to home and family in case of emergencies. And if I ever wanted to, I can go home to hang out with friends. I certainly would not give up my college experience by traveling home every weekend.</p>
<p>I know that since this is in the GT forum it will be a bit biased, but how many people are happy with their decision to come to GT (for those who are studying there) and if anyone was making the same decision as me (pitt vs gt, just consider that you were equal distance away from both), what would you choose?</p>
<p>What’s situation financial situation for you? Are you in state for UPitt? Do you got scholarship from Upitt? Are your family willing to pay regardless of cost? </p>
<p>Normally, it does not make a lot of sense to pay extra for OOS engineering school if there is good school in state.</p>
<p>Jim, you mean like Peking U’s joint programs with the elite University of Akron, Idaho State, and Washington State? They’re setting up collaborations all over the place, all the u’s in China are, and I’m not entirely sure it is a great idea to be handing over high level research expertise like that to China (we are talking about high level PhD research, not undergrad exchange like the Yale program), but that is a different topic. I’m certainly not knocking GT. GT is elite because of its own faculty, not because of any exchange program, which was my original point. But this topic has veered off course enough already.</p>
<p>OP is resident of West Virginia, so he/she is OOS for UPitt and Ga Tech. Also, the tuition for OOS is same for both schools (maybe $1000 difference).</p>
<p>So here is my reason why Ga Tech is good choice. Ga Tech is very unique for a public institution. It is serious school a lot of students do care about learning. I took courses at other public schools where people tend to treat studying is secondary. Ga Tech students tend to be goal oriented whether to get next co op assignment or find job after graduation. A lot of very smart students who turned down MIT/Ivy world due to Hope Scholarship and/or close to home. From my own experience, it is relative easy to get B’s, but getting A’s is pretty tough. Freshmen and sophomore courses are somewhat difficult but senior level courses are graded very leaning. I believe that Ga Tech degree worth more in difficult economy since there are always companies who would recruit at Tech. Also, keep in mind, Ga Tech is probably best engineering school in the Southeast (GA, FL, etc) so it always attract companies in Southeast. It probably won’t worth as much if economic is better. Ga Tech has very good international reputation due to its high ranking for engineering, architecture, even Management. It does has limited liberal art courses so if you interested in that, Tech is probably not for you. Ga Tech attract a lot of OOS/international student (close to 40%) so it has private school/national school feel and it is very rarely for public institution.</p>
<p>Also, a question for OP and Pitt supporter. Penn State is the flagship for state of Penn, can UPitt attract top students from the state?</p>
<p>Also, Penn State has higher overall ranked engineering school (23 according to USNEWS) vs Pittsburgh (46 according to USNew). Also, it also seems that most top students in forum pick Pittsburgh due to full scholarship. However, that’s only a handful of students, I assume or do Pittsburgh give a lot of students full scholarship. </p>
<p>Ga Tech also has similar program called Presidential Scholarship but it is extremely competitive.</p>
<p>Hey I do live in WV! How’d you figure it out?
Regarding the financial aid, they are both the same, I think GT costs 3000 more dollars, so its negligible. </p>
<p>They both also gave almost exactly the same amount of financial aid, that’s another reason why this decision is so challenging.</p>
<p>I also thought about Penn State as I got accepted there too, but Penn States biomed engineering is not even ranked so I thought it would decide between 2 better ranked schools. Plus, I want to live in a city, not a farm/small town, that’s why I eliminated Penn State.</p>