Engineering applicants, what other California schools are of interest to you? The CSU schools seem to focus on preparing students for working immediately after college and the UC’s seem to focus on preparing students for graduate school. If you are applying to Cal Poly, are you primarily just looking at other CSU’s, or UC’s as well? To me, Cal Poly is more like a UC in terms of selection/admission rates (and being more competitive for admissions than other CSU’s). We may use our local CSU as a back-up and apply to some of the UC’s, in addition to Cal Poly.
This is off topic, but a bit of a further clarification on a previous statement. Although most Cal Poly grads go immediately into jobs right out of undergrad, a handful choose to further their studies by attending graduate school. Some choose to stay at Poly for the extremely efficient coterminal 4+1 BS/MS. Others though leave and mostly attend very well regarded graduate programs. In scanning through the ME grads, students have gone onto RPI, CMU, Cornell, and UCLA to name a few. The two most frequently mentioned schools are Berkeley and Stanford. So, the point is, just because you can jump straight into a job doesn’t mean you have to. Poly grads are plenty well qualified and educated to enter the best grad schools in the nation.
For me, SLO is one of my average schools. My reach is HMC and my safeties are the lower half of UCs and CSUs. Im looking at a lot of top engineering schools such as Rose-Hulman, Purdue, USC, Georgia Tech, and UMIch. I have the grades and others to get in, but as for my future, I think SLO is perfect. I intend to get the 4/1 plan as stated above and work later.