<p>I'm starting to search for a good engineering school which fits me well. However, most of the top engineering programs are in the midwest, and having lived in CA most of my life, I'm not sure how well I can adjust.</p>
<p>Right now, I'm looking at Berkeley and Stanford, but also UIUC, Purdue, and UMich.</p>
<p>How do those last three on the list compare to, say, Berkeley in location? Is there much to do in Indiana and Illinois?</p>
<p>If there are some other good engineering schools near the coasts, please let me know :)</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>EDIT: Some people have told me to consider Cornell, but others have said Cornell is in the middle of nowhere :o</p>
<p>LOL. Cornell IS in the middle of nowhere, but it’s the best engineering school in the Northeast—after MIT, of course. Cornell is not really “near the coast,” though. For that, your best bet is MIT.</p>
<p>Of the Midwestern schools, Michigan is the most like Berkeley, both in the overall ambiance of the school and in the town. Its problem is that it’s 40 minutes by car from Detroit, while Berkeley is 20 minutes by rail from San Francisco. No contest. Still, if your choice comes down to Midwestern engineering schools, Michigan and Ann Arbor beat all the competition by a mile.</p>
<p>Some modifiers are in order regading “middle of nowhere” .
It is located in a small city , within a metro area of 100,000, and driving distance to some bigger cities. </p>
<p>But more importantly, that city is itself a college town, with a population of 30,000 students.</p>
<p>It is easier to be bored if you are alone in “the middle of nowhere” than it is when you are sharing company with 30,000 others who are all roughly your own age and stage in life.</p>
<p>Besides which as an engineering major you will be, shall we say, rather busy.</p>
<p>I spent quite a long time there and was not bored. I loved it there, actually.</p>
<p>As far as doing side trips to major cities, that’s certainly more difficult than at some other schools, to be sure. That one relative disadvantage was not a deal killer for me, either beforehand or in retrospect. There were a lot of offsetting advantages, and I found plenty there to do. But YMMV.</p>
<p>Ithaca, NY is no more remote than Champaign-Urbana, IL</p>
<p>U Wisconsin Madison has a beautiful lakeside location. I’d rank it well above UIUC in the looks category.</p>
<p>If you are from a warm, dry part of California, please be aware that the midwest and up-state NY have real, true, long, hard winters. One California-native I knew at Cornell was shocked by the weather. His “winter gear” barely got him through October. He also learned to his dismay that he was allergic to nearly everything that grew in that part of the country. If you have allergies, you may want to investigate this as well.</p>
<p>I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. According to my online mileage calculator, Champaign-Urbana is just over 2 hours from Chicago, while Ithaca is a good 4 hours from New York City. I think Ithaca’s a great little town in a beautiful location, but as one Cornell admissions officer said when we visited, “If you live in Ithaca everything is either 10 minutes away or 4 hours away; there’s nothing in between.”</p>
<p>That 2 hours is the difference between making an urban excursion an easy day-trip (Champaign-Urbana –> Chicago –> return) or an overnight excursion (Ithaca –> New York City –> return).</p>
<p>Except: city driving time MSA population
Binghamton 1 hr 250,000
Syracuse 1 hr 650,000
Rochester 2 hrs > 1 million
Buffalo 3 hrs 1-1/4 million</p>
<p>Yes I visited a couple of those places while I was there. But the truth is, with 30,000 college students in Ithaca, there was plenty for me to do right there, at that age and stage of life. I was not bored at all.</p>
<p>There are over 1,000 undergrads from California currently enrolled at the University of Michigan, and I am sure most of them are having a great experience. Ann Arbor is one of the most pleasant college towns in the nation and the campus is very lively and spirited.</p>