Recently toured UA with my HS junior son. Things got off to a rough start when the engineering professor who was scheduled to lead our session (for us & one other family) was a no-show & could not be found. After 45 minutes, an assistant prof showed up and did the best he could in the 15 minutes before our next appointment.
Our next tour with a junior Mechanical Engineering guide was much better. After this tour, we stopped in the Honors Office for an impromptu visit. This experience was amazing as one of the staff somehow immediately corralled four current Honors students to meet with us & answer questions.
My son is fairly early in the process, but currently has Bama high on his list.
Looking back, there was one item that I am curious about. Someone asked our ME tour guide about the size of her current upper level ME classes. Unless I misheard her response, she said that 90 was about the average. Does this sound accurate?
My daughter is not an engineering major, but since no one has responded yet, I used the class lookup on MyBama to take a look at some 300-level mechanical engineering classes. Based on that, I think what you were told about class sizes was accurate. There are some classes larger than 90 and others smaller, but that seems to be a common size. Some classes appeared to have both lectures and labs, with about 90 students in the lecture and 30 in the lab. There was some variation from class to class, of course.
Based on the ME curriculum, those juniors are all scheduled to take the same 6 or 7 core ME classes. Since most of these are lecture classes, they tend to be very large. Once you get into the labs, and electives, the class size gets much smaller.
Now, if we’re talking about a much smaller engineering department, like Environmental Engineering (which has “22” juniors), its core classes would be much smaller (unless the classes are also core to other fields, like Civil engineering),
In fact, that’s one of the nice things about the smaller “majors”, all of the students can take many of the same classes together.
^ I love when folks use the ASEE profiles, thank you! You can practically see ‘bums on seats’.
I just had a look at a few UA ME classes for ya, from current Spring 2017 semester:
Thermo I: 1 section of 76 students and another section of 134.
Thermo II: 1 section of 185 students and another of 51.
Heat Transfer: 1 section of 45 and another of 92.
ME Design I: 1 section of 71.
ME Design II: 6 sections, ranging from 13-36 students.
There are many 491/495 “Special Projects” classes (usually an elective): “Failure of Engineering” had 45 students in it…whereas “Engine Control Testing” had only 6, and everything in between.
The point is, the core courses will have more students than the specialty electives.
You’ll have to ask your other university choices about specifics on class size, but the ASEE profiles can help.
Aside: looking at the ASEE, I love to see the growth in Aero over the years! Truly doubled in 5 short years.
I just asked my EE junior about the size of his engineering classes. His response was anywhere between 50-100, which is a lot bigger than my UA CS student had (average 25), but a lot smaller than my University of Minnesota mechanical engineering son averaged. My CS student started in Fall 2012 and the freshman class was alot smaller. Since then the freshman classes have gotten bigger so my guess is the average size of the core and specialty classes will grow too.
Some are pretty large. Mechanics of Materials has something like 250 in it right now because several majors have to take it. Looking at next term DD will have 100-113 in all of her 300 level Aero courses.
You can practically see ‘bums on seats’.