<p>Worth applying to or not?</p>
<p>Would you really want to pay approx 50k a year when you could do engineering at UC Berkeley for a fraction of the cost, get access to stronger engineering faculty, and better job recruiting? </p>
<p>I talked to multiple engineering professors at Harvard, and they all straight up told me Harvard engineering sucks, and to apply Berkeley/Stanford/MIT/caltech instead. </p>
<p>I don’t know too much about Harvard engineering or the opportunities that come with having “Harvard University” on your resumé, but I’m inclined to agree with @puzzled123.</p>
<p>Harvard isn’t known whatsoever for its engineering, and I doubt that a Harvard engineering degree will confer to you special benefits that you couldn’t obtain at a school that’s good at engineering, such as Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley,Caltech, or MIT. These schools are renowned for engineering, and Stanford/MIT/Berkeley will probably provide the most opportunities for a prospective engineer. Try and shoot for Stanford/MIT if you can.</p>
<p>I mean, a Harvard engineering degree won’t put you at a disadvantage in the job market I imagine, but it wouldn’t help the way you think as other degree programs from Harvard would.</p>
<p>Worth applying to in what sense?</p>
<p>Harvard engineering makes sense for people who want to be engineering majors within a liberal arts program, and who are as invested in the variety and quality of their non-engineering courses as they are in the major. It also makes sense for people who want to be surrounded by classmates who want to excel in every subject and have access to the most dynamic extracurricular community in the world. If those things aren’t high priorities for you, Harvard engineering probably doesn’t make sense.</p>
<p>If you want to go to the best engineering school in the world, go to MIT.</p>
<p>^^^I’ll note that engineering concentrators still must take all of the gen ed classes required along with the 22 or 23 classes required for ABET accreditation, so there is very little room in the schedule for exploration of other subjects. Students taking four classes per term will have only room for one or two electives in all four years! This is a big turn off…most other schools with a core or gen eds reduce the requirement for engineering concentrators because of the increased course load. Harvard engineering still requires the foreign language requirement be fulfilled.</p>
<p>I suspect Harvard engineering graduates are more likely to be working at tech-oriented venture capital firms or practicing intellectual property law at Wall St. firms than to be working as actual engineers somewhere. Or getting – as my closest engineering friend at Yale did – a PhD from Berkeley in a related field before actually having a career.</p>
<p>If you want to get hired by a company that hires a lot of engineers to do what the engineers at those companies do, it’s true that there are lots of places that will serve your interests as well or better, starting (but hardly ending) down Mass Ave. with MIT. If you want to do that in an Ivy League setting with a lot of literature and drama students around, Cornell, Princeton, Columbia, or Penn may work better. (Of course, you can’t really count on getting into MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Columbia or Penn, so it may be worth applying to Harvard just in case, as well as, say, Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Tech, Purdue, RPI . . . .)</p>
<p>If you really want the Hahvahd experience – rubbing shoulders with world leaders, past and future, feeling really, really special, spending most of your time on ECs, figuring out what Porcellian is – and you also have an intellectual interest in engineering, then why not apply to Harvard?</p>
<p>“there is very little room in the schedule for exploration of other subjects.”</p>
<p>Gen Eds ARE exploration of other subjects. That’s their whole point. They aren’t a set of required courses. There are like 60 different courses that fulfill the humanities requirement for a Harvard engineering major. They include some of the best humanities courses in the world. (I took Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare: the Later Plays in fall '97 when it was still called a Core class, and still think about it every single time I read, see, or read about Shakespeare.) That’s what I’m talking about. Are you an engineer who cares whether your humanities course is superb vs. OK? Do you want to be thinking about it 20 years from now? Do you want to be discussing it with future humanities PhDs in the dining hall? The kid who thinks that sounds great is the one who should be a Harvard engineer.</p>
<p>I agree that an engineering major at Harvard should also be someone who is interested in humanities and other sciences - clearly the draw of Harvard is very different than MIT or an engineering focused school and students should understand the difference before applying. Getting down to brass tacks, however, gen ed requirements provide exposure to a breadth of interesting courses, but for those students who ALSO may want some depth, there is simply not enough space in the schedule. My S has been really stressed in past last week trying to pick courses for this term and have some idea for next term and beyond. He wonders how he can major in engineering and still have room to take additional courses in CS and economics past what he had last year (CS50 and the intro econ A and B). So, it looks to him like engineering is engineering plus gen eds, not engineering plus higher level courses in specific areas. On the other hand, if he concentrates in applied math, he’ll have plenty of room to earn an additional degree in econ, plus take the engineering and econ courses that interest him. </p>
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Yes, and consulting too.</p>