<p>Any current engineering students want to comment on how difficult it is to stay in the engineering program? Are you able to have a social life too? Do you go to football games? I read that it is easier to transfer into the engineering school than it is to business school from LAS or the Division of General Studies. I assume that is because so many kids drop out of engineering? Is it that hard? Any input would be helpful.</p>
<p>I don’t know where you heard that it is easier to transfer into the College of Engineering than the College of Business, but that is 100% false. I know a lot of people that tried to get into CoE by transferring in and were rejected despite good grades and everything. It is a top program, so they don’t feel the need to fill spots just because people dropped.</p>
<p>As far as staying in it goes, I have stayed in it and it I have still had plenty of a life. I am a Block Head (I help run the Block I football student section), and active member of the Orange Krush, and still have time to go to other sporting events, go to the bars once in a while, and a few concerts, and I am still doing fine in Mechanical Engineering.</p>
<p>Some advice, just don’t get yourself into that pattern of drinking like crazy right off the bat. I know it is college and you want to have fun, and you should, but you just can’t let yourself fall behind at the beginning or you will have a hard time catching up. When it all comes down to it, have fun, but make sure you keep doing your stuff on time. Also, the people I have witnessed who have dropped have almost all been after Calc 2, and after that fewer people dropped. Overall though, there aren’t a TON of people that drop, but probably more than most other majors.</p>
<p>If you want to do engineering, just do it. If you don’t like it, then transfer out. That is easier than getting in later. Just be smart when you get here.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that ROXY08 is 100% false on the comment about COE being easier than COB to transfer in to. If my memory is accurate from the summer programs that my son attended – I think it was new student orientation – when the COE leadership commented almost word for word as ROXY08 wrote.</p>
<p>I agree with IlliniFan. I believe that roxy is correct. I have heard from numerous sources that it is easier to transfer into engineering than business for several reasons. One, business has very specific requirements that are not well announced and if not fulfilled by a certain period in time (sometimes freshman year,) it is impossible to transfer. Secondly, take it or leave it, but business courses tend to be easier than engineering and thus, less kids drop after being scared away, grades/morales are higher, and transferring is also more difficult since the CoB expects a high transfer-in GPA.</p>
<p>On the other hand, engineering is challenging and many students get scared off and drop if they’re used to A’s and don’t get them. Therefore, there are many more openings for transfers. If a student expresses interest in joining the college, is qualified, and there’s room due to drop-outs, they’re in. Why would the college not fill empty seats? They get more tuition, more graduates, and more bragging rights as more qualified students join the college.</p>
<p>They won’t fill spots because an engineering college derives only a negligible amount of money from tuition. Filling “empty seats” is not their priority, since they realize they will lose a certain percentage to begin with. I could only imagine that they admit more students than they eventually have the goal of retaining knowing that they will have dropouts. An engineering school’s real income comes from research and grants. On the other hand, they WOULD try to fill spots for graduate students should they not have enough to reach their goal, since that is where they get their real money. Of course, they never have a shortage of grad students.</p>
<p>While the CoB might be harder to transfer into strictly because of its cryptic transfer requirements, the CoE has harder overall standards for getting into it (though not by a ton). I know several people who tried with extremely high grades and didn’t get it, though one of them got in on his second try after working his butt off to raise his grades even more. On the other hand, I know a couple people who had no problem transferring from the CoE to the CoB. Maybe it is just easier to go from Engineering to Business than it is from the rest of the University to Business, but I am speaking from my own personal experiences here.</p>
<p>well hopefully transferring won’t be an issue. My biggest question was how hard is it to stay in the college of engineering. Is it the projects or the labs that make it hard and time consuming. Like do you have to do a lot of work outside the classroom? Or is it just that the classes are hard …like the Math and Chem and Physics etc?</p>
<p>Yes. You absolutely do have a lot of work outside the classroom, but it tends to be very cyclical in my case. I will have a week where I do almost no work just by luck of the draw, and then 2 weeks after that where I need 36 hours in a day to get everything done. It really depends on your engineering major too. I am Mechanical, and I can tell you, the labs in the Juior level classes are ridiculous. Not necessarily hard all the time, just really time consuming. On the whole, though, I don’t know a ton of people who dropped. It is easy to stay in if you just find yourself a group of friends in your major to take classes with and to have homework and study sessions with. That will help you out not only in school, but in general since a lot of engineering work is done in teams.</p>
<p>Thanks for your reply. you have been very helpful. just out of curiosity are you from in-state or out of state? I am an out of stater and wonder if there are very many kids from out of state in engineering? BTW, I am still hoping I get admitted! I won’t find out until Dec.12th.</p>
<p>I’m out-of-state and there are more international kids than any other kind, it seems like…</p>
<p>Just for the record, it’s harder to get into the CoB because the program is overfilled.</p>
<p>The classes aren’t easy, and you certainly may have time to go out every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday… but it doesn’t do too well for your GPA. Ask me how I know :p.</p>
<p>I am in-state personally, but I think a good third of my friends from engineering are from out-of-state, so they are well represented. Probably 95% of my friends from outside the CoE are in-state, but the CoE itself doesn’t generally give that much preference if the makeup of the student body is any indication.</p>
<p>i realize that you may not be representative of the entire engineering student body, but how many hours do you spend in class/labs or doing schoolwork?</p>
<p>Well I spend 0 hours in labs anymore just because I have finished all of the classes that require them, but as an engineer, we have 6 of the required classes that require labs, and those are a lot of work. On the average, a lab writeup for 3 of those takes about 5 to 20 hours worth of work depending on the lab and how well you understand the material. It varies a lot. The other 3 are easier and take probably an hour or two.</p>
<p>As for classes, it depends on how many credit hours you take, but I am taking 14 hours right now and spend 14 hours in class per week. That is how it used to be, but generally, if you take 14 hours now, you can expect to be in class closer to 18 hours or so per week. The fact that I don’t have labs anymore cuts down on some of that class time.</p>
<p>As for work, I think I mentioned it before, but it really varies from week to week. One thing I have noticed about engineering classes vs. other classes, especially higher level engineering classes, is that you don’t always have a set schedule of assignments. It depends on how fast you are covering the material. I have weeks where I spend upwards of 20 hours working on homework, and then I have weeks where I spend no more than 4 or 5 hours. Usually, if I had to estimate, I would say it is closest to about 10 hours a week that I personally do homework on an average week.</p>
<p>Honestly though, it all depends on what type of engineering you do, and how well you understand it. For me, I did my fluids homework very quickly while a lot of my friends would take sometimes twice as long because I was passionate about the subject. On the other hand, I worked slower in classes like engineering materials because it just wasn’t my thing and wasn’t just a natural thing for me.</p>
<p>I do think that I am about average with how much time I have spent on work throughout my time here. I might have spent a little less than average, but not by a ton. Also, for me, junior year was by far the busiest for me as far as pure homework and lab times went, followed by second semester sophomore year. As a senior, I spend much more time working on projects than I do on pure homework assignments.</p>
<p>Current Fresh at UIUC here in BUS. Just wanted to correct some things in this thread to clear things up. I don’t know the exact transfer rate for COE, but for COB, they took 200/500 transfers last semester for FALL 08. I have a soph friend who was in ACES, and recently transferred this year to BUS and those were the rates he told me.</p>