Cornell vs Penn engineering, HELP!

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
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<p>The question in #17 IS simple. [And is different than #11].</p>

<p>The answer may vary as widely as there are different hiring managers, with different opinions.</p>

<p>In general, hiring managers want to hire the best candidate for the job. They usually don’t care specifically where an applicant went to college, per se. But they do have an interest in being able to make an assessment about that portion of the applicant’s credentials. Particularly for new hires with little experience, a hiring manager would prefer to be able to put a candidate’s undergrad performance in context with that of the other candidates.</p>

<p>The challenge is, here in the US there is not ubiquitous familiarity with Indian universities and their quality, admissions standards and grading practices.</p>

<p>If you are graduating from an IIT, and are interviewing for a top firm that regularly employs IIT grads, you can expect that your credentials will be fairly assessed. IMO.</p>

<p>If you are graduating from an Indian university of little international reknown, and are interviewing at a firm that does not hire tons of India-educated people, it may be a challenge for them to accurately evaluate your educational accomplishments. In that case, the manager may make assumptions. </p>

<p>However IMO these assumptions could possibly be to your benefit rather than to your detriment. For example, since they are familiar with a given local US university, a manager may well know that lots of idiots go there, That may well be the case at your U in India too, but the manager may have heard all these stories of single-digit admissions and assume that the standards at your U were actually higher than at that US school. Whether or not that’s actually the case.</p>

<p>At the end of the day, applicant comparisons are rarely limited just to school A vs. international school B, there’s more to it than that. And people with degrees from foreign universities are well represented in the US workplace.</p>

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<p>@monydad‌ Thanks a lot!
You seem to know about Indian universities, have you heard of NIT?</p>

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<p>I know hardly anything about Indian universities, and offhand I have not heard of NIT.
I’ve had work colleagues and classmates though the years that attended various colleges in India, mostly IITs.
The other schools I frankly don’t remember right now.</p>

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<p>@kaustubh0328‌: To reply in part to your question in post #17, you might remember that the defense/aerospace industries are a MAJOR employer of engineers and program managers in the United States (for example, for many years Lockheed Martin was America’s largest employer of individuals with science, engineering, and other technical degrees). MANY of these individuals require security clearances – not a few, extremely high-level credentials – and extensive non-US Government overseas time, contacts, relationships, etc. can likely cause such approvals to be considerably more difficult and time-consuming (even for American citizens). Please note that I have intentionally not addressed the overall issue of US versus Indian Bachelor’s degrees, per se. Rather, I simply highlight the fact that a rather appreciable segment of engineering jobs (especially at the entry level) may be near-closed to individuals with considerable foreign backgrounds. It may be important for you to understand: (a) that companies normally pay new engineers who are awaiting their clearance approvals; (b) that the investigative and approval processes often take about a year, even for “squeaky clean” citizens who have (for example) never left Ohio; and © that no commercial enterprise can easily afford perhaps $100K (direct compensation/benefits and overhead) annually, for possibly 18 to 24 months, while a “foreign” individual is vetted. </p>

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<p>There are 100s if not 1000s of companies doing business in US from India. They are all constrained by how many work visas can be obtained for their employees and many of them have opened offices in US and have started hiring people locally.</p>

<p>OP could simply apply to a bunch of them with a degree on hand and ask to be hired and sent to US. They don’t need to worry about waiting for next year’s quota of H-1s to send him.</p>

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<p>@kaustubh0328‌ Sorry took some time to come back and respond, but here it is.
You asked :
“Do you hire students from India? (as in, students who studied in Indian universities)”</p>

<p>In my line of work, I happen to have mostly employees who lived in and studied in India.
But they tend to be people who have a large amount of experience, where I can interview them
and assess their on the job experience in my industry. When we recruit students right out of college,
tends to be not just in US but in our region of the US. We send recruiters to top schools within a radius of our
location. This is another factor to consider even if comparing Cornell vs Penn, IMO. There is just more access
to get TO onsite interviews at employers at Penn, and I would suspect more on campus recruiting due to proximity
to major employers. My firm recently started sending recruiters to Cornell, but tough to get students to our location
as they are busy and have to travel much further to get to interviews. I think very highly of both schools but
we have hired more from Penn than Cornell, but even more from schools even closer than Penn (Columbia, NYU).</p>

<p>I agree with the comments about familiarity with schools, not just in India, but globally.
IMO, people are coming TO the US, making US colleges the most competitive admissions in the world.
Willing to go recruit a few hours away from a globally ranked institution, but half way around the world to
mostly lesser known lesser ranked colleges ? If someone applied who was recently out of school, I would look at the college as one of many factors, and if I don’t see it on a site such as</p>

<p><a href=“QS World University Rankings 2015: Top Global Universities | Top Universities”>QS World University Rankings 2015: Top Global Universities | Top Universities;

<p>I am going to assume it’s nothing special. The highly ranked ones are all US, UK and a few other places.</p>

<p>Once you have enough career experience, matters very little in the long run, probably making this
whole cc board of little importance :smile: The type of degree (math vs history) probably matters more
in the long run, not the specific college.</p>

<p>I think a handful of colleges in US/UK can help you a great deal in terms of recuiting/prestige,
but if you attend one of the other 5000 colleges in those countries, probably does not matter much US vs India. Since you did open a thread about Penn and Cornell,
I would take those over any college in India.</p>

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@kaustubh0328‌ obviously i am biased towards penn but here are some facts.

  1. here is the decision most people make when faced with the penn vs cornell question http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Cornell+University&with=University+of+Pennsylvania
  1. cornell has the better engineering school per se but penn is not too far behind (it is not like yale engineering or sth..). actually the two schools have a very different engineering student body. at cornell there tend to be ppl who want to work as engineers afterwards while at penn a significant number of engineers goes into finance, consulting, industry, what not. this is not to say that Penn doesnt produce people who go on to have tremendous careers as engineeers or that cornell doesn't send people into consulting/finance.

3.since you are applying to m&t you probably want the heavy quant background and then go into finance/consulting/industry so penn is prob more of a fit for you. even if you don’t get to m&t and get into penn engineering, you still have great chances of breaking into those industries from penn. recruitment opportunities at penn are only comparable with those at harvard and employers want penn engineers because they tend to combine a heavy quant background and also soft skills.

also if u wanna be completely superficial, penn prestige definitely trumps cornell prestige…

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Cornell and Columbia are the best engineering programs in the Ivy League.

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DD was admitted to engineering at Columbia, Penn, and Cornell. They are all good programs. Any one of them could be right for you. You should really visit them and see which one you think is right for you.

Columbia’s program is rigorous, but quite rigid. Between common core requirements and engineering requirements. There is very little flexibility in scheduling. However, the courses are very good, so that may be fine for some students. It is also on Manhattan, if you like the city. The campus is much smaller than Cornell or Penn’s. It seems to be a less unified student body. Students are more likely to leave campus for the weekend or in the evening, and the football stadium is not on the campus.

Cornell has a large, and very beautiful campus, but it is fairly remote. Ithaca is not a large town. The program is more flexible than Columbia’s, but less flexible than Penn. Engineering is one of Cornell’s stronger programs and well worth the visit. Students tend to stay on campus.

Penn’s campus is walking distance to downtown Philadelphia, and a little over an hour by train from NYC. Engineering curriculum is more flexible and a student would not have difficulty adding a minor and graduating on time. If you plan it out well from the beginning, you may even be able to add additional major or take a number of elective classes. For this reason students with broader interests are more likely to choose Penn. Like Cornell, Penn students tend to stay at Penn on the weekends. M & T is a lot of work if you are not sure that you want to be in a business program.

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@kaustubh0328 I am obviously biased but here is why i think Penn is the better choice for you. you are interersted in m&t which means you wanna go into business later on. if you manage to get into m &t its amazing. m&t is very highly regarded and most m&t students have rejected every other university (including pinceton, stanford, mit, harvard) to come to Penn.

even if you dont get into m &t penn enigneering has a great reputation has great quality and rigor. the curriculum is not as rigid as columbia’s or cornell’s and has a more well rounded aproach. also as part of penn you will have access to the amazing recruiting opoortunity (business and non-business at penn) penn is the most targeted school in the us and literally all the companies come to recruit there. recruitment opportunities are open to all students(not just wharton ones) and the statistics show that non wharton students do extremely well in business recruiting too.

of course you wont see as many students going into business from CAS and SEAS as they do from Wharton, bu this is because many of them are interested in grad school and other endeavors and not business. Wharton is also a great selling point for penn seas because you will have the chance to take wharton classes, even do an uncoordinated degree with wharton or a second major in economics in the college, be involved in business related clubs at penn (a big plus for your cv). Generallly Penn has a very integrated culture nowadays and there is flexibility between the various schools at penn. this was a conscious effort from penn admins who saw the value in taking steps to emulate schools like princeton and stanford. this cannot be said about columbia and cornell engineering where the culture is more fragmented. like there is a big divide between columbia college and fu.

in terms of rankings penn and columbia are pretty much the same (penn used to outrank columbia now is the other way around but there is no actual difference) obviously cornell is ranked higher but on the whole i think it attracts a different kind of engineer than penn does, less well rounded, more hardcore i guess. (of course this is not to say that cornell doesnt send a lot of people to business or that penn doesnt produce amazing engineering professionals too)

@ricck1 this is not true. Princeton and Cornell have the best engineering programs in the ivy league.

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@kaustlol i just saw i had already posted here

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@Penn95 Well, it is good to know that when you double post, you tell the same story!

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@Penn95. I don’t know where you get all your misinformation about Columbia. Columbia College and the Fu Foundation SEAS are completed integrated and share all facilities, from dorms, to dining halls, libraries, labs, classrooms, buildings, all courses, etc. There is complete cross registration and integration between the two schools. They share the core curriculum. Many people get dual degrees. College students have complete access to all engineering opportunities, and engineering students have complete access to the unparalleled opportunities of the liberal arts College. Also Columbia Business School is the next building over from the engineering buildings, that again allows seamless registration and access. Columbia has a very small, gated, integrated campus with 99% of students living right on the campus, creating a very inviting, intellectual tight knit. community. There are not people and dorms, and buildings spread out all over a town.