Columbia Engineering

Colleges and Universities A-Z Columbia University
1

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>For all current engineers or for students who are definetly planning on attending SEAS, I have a couple :rolleyes: of questions:</p>

<p>Which engineering major is most popular?
What do students do after graduation?
Which graduate schools do they typically attend?
What percentage get jobs in engineering after their four years?
What is the graduation rate?
Which companies recruit from Columbia?
What opportunities are there for undergraduate research?
What are the core classes?
Can we take a "general" engineering course Freshman year that will introduce us to the many majors?
How do students come to decide which engineering major best suits them? </p>

<p>Thanks in advance. You can answer a couple or all if you'd like. Anything is helpful as I make my decision between Cornell eng. and Columbia SEAS.</p>

2

<p>Which engineering major is most popular?
Among the largest majors are Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Financial Engineering(IEOR) which Columbia is actually really good at.</p>

<p>What do students do after graduation?
Many students go into med/law/gradschool, many go into business/finance, a handful go into technical fields.</p>

<p>Which graduate schools do they typically attend?
Top schools-MIT, Cornell, etc etc etc.</p>

<p>What percentage get jobs in engineering after their four years?
Plenty.</p>

<p>What is the graduation rate?
Good.</p>

<p>Which companies recruit from Columbia?
All the big companies you'd probably see at other schools--such as, Accenture, iBanks such as Morgan and whatnot, Boeing, GE, you name it.</p>

<p>What opportunities are there for undergraduate research?
All of the departments have undergrad research opportunities</p>

<p>What are the core classes?
Math, Physics, Chem OR Bio, Gateway Lab, choice of Lit Hum or Western Civ, Art or Music, and some small professional intro class you can pick. And a computer science course, Java.</p>

<p>Can we take a "general" engineering course Freshman year that will introduce us to the many majors? Yes there are the small professional introductory courses that introduce you to a major--Intro to EE, Intro to BME (ok these aren't the actual names, but you get the idea) </p>

<p>How do students come to decide which engineering major best suits them?
Heck if I know =)</p>

<p>As for Cornell Eng vs Columbia SEAS, I'd say...</p>

<p>If you're a hardcore "techie" engineer who doesn't want a strong liberal arts background, go to Cornell. If you wanna read Kant while staring at circuitboards, go to Columbia. I chose Columbia because I wanted a broader education. I don't want some liberal arts major being my boss 10 years down the road, so I want to get that valuable exposure to it while learning engineering. It makes you more flexible and able to deal with a larger variety of problems and think in a different way. It just conditions your mind differently than a strict engineering curriculum would.</p>

3

<p>i've been trying to ask this many times before, but, how difficult is it to transfer from seas into cc?</p>

4

<p>they treat you like any other transfer - so its just as hard as transferring in from any other school to columbia college</p>

5

<p>Which is stupid as hell IMO, and which is why I'm most probably turning Columbia down. What kind of a school would want you to not have real flexibility in exploring your academic interests? </p>

<p>I can understand the core as a body of knowledge they feel all Columbia educated students should have access to, but God, if engineering doesn't work out, why would they be so ridiculous about transferring?</p>

<p>Whatever, they're an Ivy and they can do whatever they want, but that policy makes it seem like they don't care about helping their students find a real academic niche, or that they don't really understand that interests can easily change.</p>

<p>Joey</p>

6

<p>The reason they make it difficult is that they don't want students who really have no interest in engineering using SEAS as a backdoor into Columbia, since traditionally SEAS is easier to get into. I don't know whether that will change now that SEAS is really coming into its own.</p>

7

<p>yeah, i'm deciding between berkeley and columbia's engineering, and I'm concerned about that lack of flexibility. I understand the reason that they don't want it as a backdoor way to get into the college, but they should give you some type of edge. Like, right now, i think I want to do engineering, but how could I be a high school senior and be 100% sure of what I want to do with my life.</p>

8

<p>I can understand that. At Berkeley, engineering is more difficult to get into than L and S, therefore, to tranfer OUT of engineering is not a problem.</p>