<p>Hey, thanks for your answers. You told me sort of what I was thinking also.</p>
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<p>University of Michigan, unless UMich is unaffordable. I do not see any advantage of going to Bradley over Michigan, excluding the price.</p>
<p>i believe that prestige only comes into place when comparing in-state colleges, by that i mean like Mich>Mich St. and UT>Texas Tech. I think that you should only go to a prestigious, expensive college for undergrad if: 1. u get a generous scholarship, 2. ur parents are ridiculously rich, or 3. ur state doesn’t have a good in-state college (no offense, but states such as Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, etc).</p>
<p>“i believe that prestige only comes into place when comparing in-state colleges, by that i mean like Mich>Mich St. and UT>Texas Tech. I think that you should only go to a prestigious, expensive college for undergrad if: 1. u get a generous scholarship, 2. ur parents are ridiculously rich, or 3. ur state doesn’t have a good in-state college (no offense, but states such as Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, etc).”</p>
<p>Or if you want any chance of going to the lucrative fields like BB IBD/S&T or MBB consulting…
Take the previous poster as an example, his chance of going to any of those fields from Bradley would be approximately the same as my chance of being promoted to MD after this summer internship.</p>
<p>Since the example was brought up, I’ll note that DS chose the Bradley full tuition offer over his other options. The school met all his needs, including the ability to get a good engineering education. Bradley is well-respected regionally, and he’ll be taught by professors in all his classes, which are smaller than at Mega U. Thus, he’ll get more attention if needed in class, and because all his profs will know him by name, he might have more undergrad research opportunities. Both recruiting and internships are strong in the midwest and Chicago in particular.</p>
<p>When he goes on to grad school, he’ll have all the dollars he saved to pay for it, and assuming he stands out at Bradley, better grades and recommendations. Plus, for those consumed by prestige, his MS will be the degree people look at.</p>
<p>Will fewer of his classmates be high achievers? Perhaps, but there will be enough smart, driven kids to challenge him. For him, I really don’t see much of a downside. Everyone makes their choices based on their values and perceptions, and others might choose differently. You do what’s right for you.</p>
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<p>Magnificent post! Couldn’t agree more. Do people not realize that top schools still do accept people who go to a “less-prestigious” university?</p>
<p>I wonder how many Brown engineering grads go into top Engineering programs such as MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley?</p>
<p>I will say this, if I were actually a Harvard Grad. walking around in a Harvard Alum sweater, I’d definitely have that feeling of superiority.</p>
<p>It’s ok to have a sort of smug feeling if you’ve gone to a universally recognized academic institution; what’s not ok is to compare the academic quality of programs without any sort of objective metric to compare them (or has objective evidence been offered in this thread?)</p>
<p>oh… i didn’t mean to sound like that… actually i am pretty worried about studying engineering in a school which is not well-known for engineering. i just wonder what i should to prove that i can survive in a hard-core engineering school in the future</p>
<p>I don’t think anybody was making a reference to you in particular, ORFEboy</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I think the Brown name will command the attention of just about anybody, and as long as the program is decent, I’m sure it won’t be a bad thing you went to Brown.</p>
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<p>I believe that’s been done already by the U.S. News.</p>
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<p>It will be a lot more challenging at top-tier school. There is a reason why vast majority of people who transfer to my school with 4.0 in their previous university end up with something like 3.0 when they graduate.</p>
<p>^^^^^</p>
<p>When you say challenging, I assume you mean primarily the grading curve. At a top tier school like Cal, there are more students who could do “A” work at a lower ranked school, but not all will get A’s. Grad schools will take that into consideration, but at Cal, it’s clear who the best students are. For someone who gets A’s at Bradley (or another lower tier school), it’s unknown if they’d be a 3.9 student at Cal or a 3.4. Taking a top Bradley student involves some measure of risk, putting them (on grades alone) somewhere between those levels.</p>
<p>Other factors help clear up the picture, from standardized test results to recommendations. My contention is the top Bradley student will get a better recommendation than a 3.4 Cal student, even when the Bradley student would be a 3.4 Cal student and certainly if they’d be a 3.9 Cal student, because the professors know them and push (mentor) them.</p>
<p>As far as rigor of instruction, the difference is marginal in most cases. Even when top schools require more to help differentiate their students (and I contend that’s both overstated and overrated), the best Bradley students will challenge themselves beyond what’s required anyway - that’s part of what made them top students. Grad schools know from experience who’s likely to succeed there and who isn’t, and the evidence is that a top student from a lower ranked school does fine at top-ranked grad schools.</p>
<p>I think the GRE Subject Tests are a good idea. They are a pretty objective metric for CS, Math, Physics… why did they do away with the engineering one?</p>
<p>I’ve been in the business for 10 years and my impression is that it doesn’t matter. Engineering is about creativity, hardwork, and making money for your employeer. If you do those three things no one will care where you went to school.</p>
<p>If you intend to get licensed though, make sure your school is accredited or you might have problems with your state’s board.</p>
<p>I don’t think GRE subject tests are objective. I would assume that the harder questions on an undergrad algorithms course would be much much harder than anything on the GRE CS subject test. The GRE is a joke, just like the SAT/SATII.</p>
<p>Now I hear that the MCAT is a legitimately difficult test.</p>
<p>@RetardedBear</p>
<p>From your name and the top 3 school you are attending I will assume you are going to UC Berkeley. There is a distinct advantage o going to UC Berkeley or any other otp school, even if you are not even among the top half of the students. Look at the career page and you will see that many of the EECS majors end up getting jobs at top corporations like Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and Apple and over 10-15 get into Berkeley grad school with many others going to Stanford, Cornell, UT Austin, UCLA, UCSD, and MIT. At my school, there are only 6 or 7 CS and ECE majors who go to grad school and we would be lucky if two of them go to UC Berkeley, MIT, or Stanford for grad school (we have good industry connections so not many go to third tier grad schools or go to grad school since they’re unemployment).</p>
<p>@IndianPwnerDude:</p>
<p>I’m not sure how the difficulty of the test has anything to do with its objectiveness. If your complaint is that the test needs to be harder, then that could be a valid complaint. But I fail to see how that in any way refutes my point. If you want to talk about its difficulty, fine, but let’s agree that it is objective, in the usual English sense of the word.</p>
<p>As far as the difficulty goes, I imagine the ETS adjusts the difficulty so that some predefined distribution is favored. If most people get the full score on the GRE, then maybe that’s how they want it? If certain questions, say, from algorithms, are easier than others, say, from architecture, maybe that’s how they want it? I tend to trust huge companies whose job it is to develop standardized tests when it comes to the composition and grading of standardized tests.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t have anything against making the test harder, but I’m sure that if it were so advantageous to do so, the ETS would already be all over that.</p>
<p>People tell me all the time that I will regret it if I attend Rochester Institute of Tech or Rose Hulman because I won’t have a job when I graduate because I didn’t go to MIT.
I don’t care what they say. Those schools really appeal to me. They fit my personality. If you get accepted at MIT and attend, but you are miserable…Is it really worth it then? No.
I want to get into RIT or RHIT because I know I will enjoy my years there and get an amazing education. They both have good graduation rates and job placement opportunities in my opinion. Its not all about prestige.</p>