Engineering students at NCSU may be admitted as “engineering first year” or “exploratory studies”. In either case, students need to apply into a competitive secondary admission process (CODA) to declare their majors.
Unfortunately, the CODA statistics linked in post #58 are not very useful, in that they do not show admission rates by college GPA ranges. Hence, it is not obvious which majors are more or less competitive to get into, so engineering students may find that their first year is focused on “managing their college GPA” more than anything else (and using a 4 on BC as two B grades may be detrimental in CODA to popular majors).
I am still intrigued by the extremely low number of women in Electrical, Mechanical and Computer Engineering. Looks like the Bio Engineering and some others majors are more balanced, have more women.
ME and EE generally skew male across colleges overall. Biology skews female across colleges overall, so it is not too surprising if bioengineering / biomedical engineering is more gender balanced than ME and EE.
It’s pretty common; while touring colleges, D20 was always in a small minority of women. We noticed ME & EE skewed more “geek” than other engineering majors. D20 has always been mechanically and CS minded with interests like robotics and coding; it’s been difficult for her to find girls/women with similar interests. She goes one step further with her interests in comics, gaming and D&D though. Her friends have mostly been male. Is it nature or nurture? I think it’s probably both.
As for NCSU, she found their engineering department to be more competitive vs collaborative. All of their presentations focused on competitions; this was a big turnoff for D20. They discussed the competitive secondary application for major; BioE was the most competitive with 130 spots each at NCSU and UNC.
I would have her look at UAH, MO S&T and possibly UTK for matches/safeties. D20 was surprisingly impressed with UTKs engineering department. My nephew and his girlfriend attend MO S&T; both are interning at SpaceX. They were chosen over thousands of students from bigger name schools. Good luck in your search!
You can always consider a women’s only program in engineering. Sweet Briar college is excellent in that regard. Very supportive of women in STEM:
Smith College is another fabulous school. A regular poster’s daughter goes there. Cannot remember who it is top of my head.
Smith will be a tougher admit though.
What @Tigerwife92 said about NCSU is true. It is very competitive. The CODA process and general weedout mentality of the school were two reasons my son chose not to attend.
And that is something I would be very careful of. Many engineering schools that are “ranked” high, whatever that may mean, have a very distinct sink or swim type of atmosphere. Weed out classes are brutal and designed to push students to the brink. NCSU had I believe 8 student deaths last year and most suicides were in the school of engineering.
She may want to look into Rochester Institute of Technology if she hasn’t already. Lots of gaming and digital art there, as well as the engineering disciplines. As the school is almost 2/3 male, they would probably be happy to attract a strong female applicant with some additional merit aid.
She’s at Clemson; she chose it for the collaborative environment, fit and location. We live in SC now, so in-state rates. She’s also minoring in Digital Production Arts (DPA); I like to say one feeds her mind, the other her soul. If fit is a big factor, definitely tour the schools if you can; also have her look at student organizations at each school.
Seems like NC’s other public university with a wide range of engineering majors (NC A&T) has a much less competitive environment to declare or change into the various engineering majors.