<p>@BanjoHitter
Couldn’t of said it better myself. Anyone who denies that an IVY league school doesnt put you in an advantageous position is out of touch with reality.</p>
<p>I might be a business guy, but my uncle is in IB, he told me that the most succesful people in the IB sector are those that majored in engineering.</p>
<p>Top school + Engineering = Thousands of options.</p>
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<p>You are out of touch with reality. The definition of “advantageous position” varies wildly depending on who you ask. For someone with no interest in investment banking or management consulting, one could just as easily argue that an Ivy League school not named Princeton or Cornell is disadvantageous when it comes to engineering. In fact, I would personally argue that it is at the very best no better than going to one of the good engineering schools.</p>
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<p>Be that as it may, the number of engineering students that aspire to be an investment banker are very low. The number of engineering students who aspire to be an engineer is very high. For the majority of engineering students, having a better shot at investment banking is irrelevant.</p>
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<p>Let me fix that for you:</p>
<p>Top overall school (average engineering like most Ivies) + Engineering = Several options, including IB and MBB</p>
<p>Good engineering school (average overall like most state flagships) + Engineering = Many options, no IB or MBB</p>
<p>Top overall school with top engineering (like most Berkeley, Stanford, UMich) + Engineering = Many, many options including IB and MBB</p>
<p>You’re making me excited now boneh3ad haha. Even if you don’t go to a top school right away, if you work your ass off you can transfer in… I’m starting at UMich for computer science in the fall after 3 years at a community college (changed from two completely different majors and it really wasn’t that hard to kick ass at the cc). I am instate though so I don’t know how big of a difference it is. IS tuition and acceptance is one of the good reasons to live in Michigan, #2 is the Red Wings but that’s all we got. There’s other people from my honors program in my cc that have went to Columbia, Cornell, quite a bit more that went to Mich, and I know of at least one person that’s getting their masters at Harvard right now so starting off at a non-top school isn’t really such a big deal in a lot of cases.</p>
<p>Y’know the first (and usually ONLY) item that is pointed out with these “does my school matter in engineering” is the NON-engineering field on IB which employs a very small fraction of engineering grads. It’s incredible how often IB is mentioned on an engineering forum.</p>
<p>If one looks at how colleges are actually “businesses”, you can see how this works. Keep in mind that if you have invested over $200,000 in tuition for a Top-10 school…working at an entry-level $75,000 job out of school pretty much makes you similar to the NFL 1st-round draft pick who never won a starting role. If ALL of the engineering opportunities were the same then that Top-10 school would have a hard time convincing new students to take engineering. Therefore, the dangling carrot is the IB/MBB industry. Of course there will be fierce competition for those internships (and later on jobs), but at least we (top-10 schools) give you the “chance”.</p>
<p>The QUESTION is should a new student “take the risk”. True if you don’t make it to IB, you probably will be recruited by some engineering firm for traditional engineering work without a doubt, but you will still be that 1st-round bust.</p>
<p>Personally, I have NO problems with those who can constantly drive themselves and succeed at the best level (supposedly) getting the bigger slice of pie. At the same time, some of us like more of a “safety net” and are fine with our decisions.</p>
<p>So the question is does one take the risk…if there is not much grants/scholarships to cover tuition of a top-10 school? The out-of-pocket money is a factor in the risk because anyone would attend an Ivy if the money is right. Hell, if Columbia or Cornell allowed “back door graduate admissions” with my employer paying, I would have went there in a heartbeat…but as I remember just before starting grad school and calling the Columbia engineering grad office about 100 times, they KEPT saying…</p>
<p>“We will admit you the the grad certificate program but we are NOT guaranteeing admission to the M.S. program. We don’t care WHAT your GPA is.”</p>
<p>So let’s rule out if the student has scholarships.</p>
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<p>This always has and continues to astound me, to be honest. I don’t get the infatuation with it.</p>
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I have since migrated to the optical side but you were otherwise correct. I think the top schools for us for E&M are Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Northwestern, and UIUC - ignore the fact that they are all Big Ten schools, right now this is just where a lot of the big E&M guys happen to be.</p>
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<p>I just had a chance to ask one of our engineering Directors about why we didn’t recruit engineers from Harvard. His response? “Why would I want to recruit engineers from Harvard? I can get stronger engineers down the street!”</p>
<p>This may come as a surprise, but engineering is largely populated by that group of people who thought popularity contests were dumb. Hiring for engineers is not much swayed by how prestigious the school is to non-engineers, it is swayed by how good their engineering graduates are. My first year at my current company I noticed that when certain people were introduced, their schools almost always got mentioned - “So-and-so did his masters at GT” or “That’s one of our top guys, did his PhD at Illinois” - and it was always a certain list of schools that drew this attention. None of them were Ivy League. We have another top guy at the company, did his PhD at Princeton - they mention that he is a top guy, but no one seems to think Princeton is worth mentioning, and I only know about it because they listed it on a Powerpoint slide at one point.</p>
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Out of curiosity, where did you get this number, and who decides when they have “left” engineering? I just spent a day in design briefings with three other engineers with 25+ years of experience, two of whom have an official title that says “Manager”, and this was not an organizational meeting - they were the primary design engineers for these two programs. I have not yet met an engineering manager at my company below the level of Director who did not spend 50% or more of their time as an engineer, and even at the Director level they often still do some engineering work - up to and including our Executive VP.</p>
<p>Heck, about two years ago I got to sit and listen to a panel of three senior “former” engineers - one in engineering management, one in program management, and the other working as a straight-up engineer. We were somewhat surprised when we reached the point in the discussion when they revealed that they, like most of their colleagues in the company, tended to rotate through many of those position - all three had held management and senior engineering positions in the past and expected to do both in the future. So how many of them “left” engineering for management?</p>
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<p>When you are looking at graduate students for positions, is relevancy to what the graduate student’s project to what you guys are doing in the company super important? I can see why you would prefer a guy who had the most relevant experience, but do you, for example, sometimes hire guys who worked on a diode laser project in graduate school to work on RF systems? The EM theory is largely transferable, although the experimental know-how and familiarity with the practical aspects of design in a different field may be lacking.</p>
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<p>Haha, now I really believe my friend who worked for a finance company for a while and admitted that they really didn’t know what they were doing. What an incredibly stupid system. </p>
<p>Although maybe in that business there is not much to learn and maybe a guy straight out of school can take the same wild shots in the dark as the experienced guy. What a crock.</p>
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No. For BS and MS holders, we hire at entry level (although those with an MS get paid more) and expect to spend a certain amount of time training them anyway. Many of our engineers wind up in different departments than we initially expected - including myself, migrating from RF to optical in my first two years. If you had specialized in the optical side, that would be your initial placement but you would be allowed to try a position in RF and (if you and they liked the result) possibly migrate to that department.</p>
<p>For PhD’s it is a little more stringent, as we are hiring them like experienced engineers and expect at least some relevance of their studies to what they are actually going to be doing, but even there we have some flexibility.</p>