<p>Hi parents with engineering backgrounds/knowledge. </p>
<p>I am starting to get nervous about making this decision in the next few weeks, especially since I am the only one in my family with an interest in engineering, so cannot get any solid advice from parents or siblings :(</p>
<p>Obviously I have not yet heard from all the schools that I applied to, and have not visited all of them either, but I would like to do some sort of analysis in my head.</p>
<p>I am currently leaning towards Mechanical engineering. So far I have been accepted to WUSTL and PSU and got likely letters from Bucknell and UCLA. And I am waiting to hear from NW, Rice, Vandy, CMU, Cal, Michigan, Duke. I dont expect to get into Duke, and I may not be interested in Bucknell (too regional?)</p>
<p>Besides cost, how do I weigh these programs, the quality of instruction, opportunities, time it takes to graduate (like Cal), advising (like Michigan not so good), recruitment, and what the engineering philosophy is. I am not even sure what questions to ask when I visit these schools.............</p>
<p>A lot of engineering hiring is ‘local’ - we’re located somewhere in the Midwest and nearly all of our employees are from a Big 10 school… So, if you plan to work in a certain location after graduation, that could have a ‘slight’ impact on your decision. I’m not saying a UCLA grad won’t be working in a Detroit auto firm or a Texas aerospace firm, but it seems to be a regional thing more often than not.</p>
<p>Second, if you’re good enough to get into any of the programs you applied, individual differences won’t be that important. They will be, but not as much as you think.</p>
<p>Third, like any field, Mech Eng has sub-specialties. If you want to design cars for a living, some programs may be better than others. Want to do nanotechnology type stuff? different than cars obviously. Robotics, we all know where And so on. If you already have something in mind, now’s the time to decide.</p>
<p>Also consider intangibles like student life, diversity, distance from home, weather, regional allure, and so on.</p>
<p>[University</a> of California: StatFinder](<a href=“http://statfinder.ucop.edu%5DUniversity”>http://statfinder.ucop.edu) indicates 4, 5, and 6 year graduation rates for freshmen entering in 2003 and graduating in CS or Engineering are:</p>
<p>Berkeley CS+Engineering: 76.4% at 4 years, 92.1% at 5 years, 93.1% at 6 years
UCLA CS: 40.5% at 4 years, 73.8% at 5 years, 81.0% at 6 years
UCLA Engineering: 48.7% at 4 years, 84.4% at 5 years, 89.4% at 6 years</p>
<p>Average time to graduation is given for the 2002 entering freshman classes:</p>
<p>Berkeley CS+Engineering: 4.1 years
UCLA CS: 4.5 years
UCLA Engineering: 4.4 years</p>
<p>Some schools have career surveys, so you can get an idea of how recruiting activity is in their career centers (local companies will likely show up at any school with an ABET-accredited engineering program that they are looking for students in; non-local companies tend to be more selective in where they travel to):</p>
<p>How important is ABET accreditation? I intend to study biomedical engineering and one of the schools i got into is not abet accredited for biomedical engineering.</p>
<p>Not sure how important ABET is. Nephew went to a school for Biomed Engineering that was not ABET accredited for Biomed because the program was started after the university’s last ABET visit. He got into all the PhD programs he applied to and is now at Hopkins.</p>
<p>My son is very happy with his experience at UCLA Engineering. He graduated in 4 years, earned his Master’s in another 9 months, and is now a PhD candidate. All of his grad school has been paid for with a UCLA fellowship which includes a living stipend. His professors have been very helpful in hiring him for internships, and laboratory research jobs.</p>
<p>US News and World Report will have some data and their rankings for different programs. ABET accreditation is a big deal IMO. Look to see if you can get details about the specific engineering programs through each individual university’s website. A good school should have some kind of career services department for their students with stats on placements, etc. Try to see what employers (and how many) come for on-campus interviews and are kniown to take interns and co-ops from the school in your department. See if these are companies you’d want to work for. For engineering students, internships and co-ops are very important in getting hired right out of college. Typically, at schools that provide these types of opportunities, it may take 5 years or more to graduate because the programs allow for internship/co-op time.</p>
Biomed Eng is a relatively new field so I doubt ABET accreditation is important at all. The same is true for some other engineering majors, like CS.</p>
<p>To validate it one way or the other review the particular college’s website to see who hires their grads in the particular program and what their job placement is.</p>
<p>Consider it mandatory for civil and environmental engineering, where getting a Professional Engineer license is common and having an ABET accredited degree helps with that.</p>
<p>In the other more established engineering fields like chemical, electrical, materials, and nuclear, pretty much any worthwhile engineering degree program in the US is ABET accredited.</p>
<p>In some newer fields like computer science and bioengineering, ABET accreditation is not strictly necessary, but if the program lacks it, you have to either go by the reputation of the school or compare the curriculum to that of other schools to check how good it is. For this reason, it is mainly the schools with the highest reputation forego ABET accreditation in these fields – less well known schools are more likely to get ABET accreditation as a means of proving that their degree programs meet a (high) minimum standard of quality.</p>
<p>Beware, though, that some very limited (not ABET accredited) computer science degree programs exist.</p>
<p>It may be hard to assess, but it would be good to get a sense of how much attention undergrads receive. (Or is all of the professor attention going to graduate students?) What is the typical class size for engineering undergrad classes? </p>
<p>Apart from engineering, what are you looking for regarding the fit of the school? All of the schools you list are strong, and you can safely pick for reasons of fit rather than just the strength of the engineering program.</p>
<p>Thank you all.
I would be equally comfortable in a big school or small school socially, so long as it’s not tiny as in <2000.</p>
<p>My worry about schools like Cal or Michigan is being just a number, having to wait outside a professor’s office along with 50 others to get a few minutes of time, etc. I am not looking for personal attention, but some of the comments on the Cal and Mich sites are a little scary.</p>
<p>UCLA Band Mom, what engineering did your son study, and was he able to graduate in 4 years because he came in with 15 AP credits, or because he did a combined BS/MS</p>
<p>Another thing that I feel really dumb about, is, I’m not sure that Mechanical Engg. is where I want to be. And while some schools have a whole year of foundation courses so it’s easy to switch without losing too much, others are far more specific in their requirements.</p>
<p>Littlered, you have just given yourself one data point to help you pick among your possible choices! Perhaps you should winnow your choices to those with a general foundational year so as to ensure yourself the flexibility you might want.</p>
<p>I think that many of colleges have engineering programs that allow transfer between types with minimal credit loss. Often you can figure that out by looking online. </p>
<p>Even large schools I think try to keep the student/professor ratio low (plus Teaching assistants help too). You are likely to see the biggest difference in freshman intro classes, where the lectures at large universities could be especially large. On the other hand, there may be a variety of tutor sessions offered where the are lots of engineering students. </p>
<p>Personally I liked going to a school that wasn’t too large (under 3.000)… but mostly engineers. That way there was lots of course variety, but not a jumbo campus. But all options have pros/cons.</p>
<p>Class size gets smaller in more advanced courses (could be hundreds in freshman level math and physics (much smaller if honors courses are offered) to dozens for common junior level courses to a very small number for less common junior and senior level electives). Many schools have on-line schedules of classes where you can see the class size of each course.</p>
<p>^Even class size is not always enough to get a sense of how much attention undergrads get. I studied electrical engineering at a state flagship U as an undergrad (lower tier than Cal or Michigan), and at an Ivy for grad school. It was clear that the Ivy undergrads got a lot more professor attention than we did at the state flagship I attended.</p>
<p>For example, a small class I took as a senior at the public flagship, with the most famous professor in the department, the famous professor probably missed about 1/3 of the classes, and a grad student filled in. I really don’t feel like I learned much in that class. Also as a senior, I was a TA for a lab in a class I had taken the previous year, and filled in and taught the full class once when the professor was out of town.</p>
<p>The famous professor part is usually for recommendation letters and bragging rights, not for learning. At Purdue we had a large number of brand names in the area I was in, and while the brand names could write rec letters that would get one into the Elbonian Academy of Sciences or similar without any second thought, few were great ‘communicator’ teachers that would explain Thevenin’s theorem to toddlers…</p>
<p>The brand names help bring money and fame into the department - what the department does with the fame and money is not necessarily always ‘useful’ to all students but can be useful in general.</p>
<p>Never had either of those things happen. The primary instructor (always a faculty member except for one freshman English composition course) was almost always leading the class session as expected. In the rare cases where the primary instructor was not present, the substitute was a different faculty member in the same department.</p>
<p>There were undergraduate lab assistants in computer labs where students in the class would do their programming assignments during unscheduled time, but they were distinct from teaching assistants doing scheduled discussion and lab time. Of course, that was back when you had to go to the computer lab to do your programming assignments, instead of doing them on your own computer.</p>
<p>Just a warning: ABET accreditation for Computer Science is a complete joke.</p>
<p>I’ve pulled up a few sample states which which I’m familiar, and found that many solid CS programs aren’t mentioned at all (which is OK, and I expected that). But I was shocked to find quite a few ABET accredited CS programs from schools that I know for a fact don’t offer anything vaguely resembling a Computer Science degree. Very disappointing to see!</p>
And so on. If you already have something in mind, now’s the time to decide.</p>