<p>"There are MANY students who drop out after the first year of medical school due to the inability to keep up."</p>
<p>I think around 97% of those who get in stay to get their MD.</p>
<p>Glad I found this! My jr D was gung ho on pharmacy but is now focusing on chem engineering. We have 5 pharmacists in our family. It takes 6 yrs of higher than usual UG tuition to get that degree and even tho you might start out between $85-100K I agree that standing in a drugstore on 3rd shift and ringing out folks is hardly worth $100K to me--and the relatives who own their own store work terribly long hours 6.5 days a week and the hospital pharmacy head works every third weekend. I think D figured out that she can get CE BS in 4-5 yrs and with coop ed can make up to $9K a term to help with costs. She might only make $45-55K to start but will have more regular hours and more career change opportunities. Also, most pharm programs want you to have ave 3.6-3.8 GPA and fierce competition whereas engineers can hover in the 3.0-3.5 range (leaving her time for sorority life!).</p>
<p>PS--at one university we visited, a lot of pre-pharm students who weren't accepted for professional level turned to engineering (esp the biomedical type). In pharmacy, after the first 1-2 yrs, you get no humanities, arts etc just science. Even the engineering programs we are checking allow some electives out of the field.</p>
<p>"you to have ave 3.6-3.8 GPA"</p>
<p>That's exactly my concern. The dilemma is that engineering and health professional careers tend to be exclusive, because getting 3.5 in engineering is ridiculously harder than getting 3.5 in biology.</p>
<p>I'm thinking ahead because although I think if I devote myself, I can get a high GPA in biology/easier courses (I'm very good at memorization). However, the big problem is that if i get rejected, I don't have a back up career. I considered engineering as a back up, but then, my back up would jeopardize the initial plan: getting into med/pharm/whatever school.</p>
<p>How do you know you'll get a higher GPA in biology? That's not guaranteed, and the job market is tough for hard science majors. If engineering is what you're good at, then getting the high GPA is more likely than in bio. And if it doesn't work out, don't you want to be an engineer in the first place? So much can go wrong between now and then (you might even disover you had medicine) that you should just go with your gut feeling.</p>
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That's exactly my concern. The dilemma is that engineering and health professional careers tend to be exclusive, because getting 3.5 in engineering is ridiculously harder than getting 3.5 in biology.</p>
<p>I'm thinking ahead because although I think if I devote myself, I can get a high GPA in biology/easier courses (I'm very good at memorization). However, the big problem is that if i get rejected, I don't have a back up career. I considered engineering as a back up, but then, my back up would jeopardize the initial plan: getting into med/pharm/whatever school.
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<p>Now I think you've hit upon the true horns of the dilemma of engineering. It is indeed a tradeoff between risk and reward. Engineering does tend to grade harder than do other majors which does mean that your chances of getting into, say, med- school will probably be impaired. Engineering is therefore like buying a career 'insurance policy', as you can get a pretty decent job with just a bachelor's degree, but of course, as in the real world, insurance isn't free. You have to pay for insurance. </p>
<p>To that, I would say that if you really feel that you are good at memorization, and you like memorizing things, then you should probably go for a major that requires a lot of memorization (like bio, or perhaps even better, something like a foreign language or history). I think it is important to go with what you're good at. You can think of it this way. If you are a superstar at memorization, then majoring in a foreign language or history will require relatively little effort for you, meaning that you will have plenty of spare time to improve your career prospects by working on part-time co-ops or internships, as well as doing lots of networking as well as extra time to learn all sorts of practical skills (i.e. attending Toastmasters to learn public speaking, which is one of the most important business skills to have). If you do that right, you will be in far better shape career-wise than most other graduates, including most engineers.</p>
<p>I'd say Engineering is a great option only if you can get into a grea engg. school......Also, some schools with their programs guarantee work after that, so there is job and financial security, but in the end the decision's up to you!</p>
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I'd say Engineering is a great option only if you can get into a grea engg. school......Also, some schools with their programs guarantee work after that, so there is job and financial security, but in the end the decision's up to you!
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<p>What is considered a great Engineering school?</p>
<p>The usual MIT, Stanford, CMU etc or do okay state schools like Rutgers and UMD count?</p>
<p>There are some great (not just okay) state school engineering programs, like UIUC.</p>
<p>In a sense, I think if you're school is decent enough - you will still get recruited. I've been in interview sessions (and gotten the job afterwards) with MIT/Cornell/UIUC students and I go to a state school of slightly lower caliber than UIUC.</p>
<p>It just shows that the school doesn't matter as much (still does though), but it's all up to you - as far as what you do and do not do.</p>
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I'd say Engineering is a great option only if you can get into a grea engg. school
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<p>I think it's also a great option if you're only good enough to get into an okay school. At lower tier schools, I bet you would get much better job offers than other majors. However, the difference is probably a lot less at some of the better schools.</p>
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I'd say Engineering is a great option only if you can get into a grea engg. school.....
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I think it's also a great option if you're only good enough to get into an okay school. At lower tier schools, I bet you would get much better job offers than other majors. However, the difference is probably a lot less at some of the better schools.
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<p>I would actually say precisely the opposite - that engineering is a fantastic option if you can only get into a low-ranked school. That's because of the simple fact that engineering students from top-ranked schools don't make significantly more than engineering students from lower-ranked schools. Yes, there usually is a difference, but that difference is relatively small, i.e. less than 10%. To take chemical engineering as an example, there are some years in which ChemE students from schools such as MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley actually make lower average starting salaries than the national starting ChemE average. That's right - lower. </p>
<p>{Frankly, I think that's a big reason why so many of the engineering students at the top schools end up not taking engineering jobs, but instead take jobs in investment banking or management consulting. They see that engineering companies are unwilling to reward them for obtaining a degree from a top school, so they'll instead work for an employer who will.}</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if you just barely graduated from high school and can only get into a low-tier school, then graduating with an engineering degree and getting that 40-50k starting job is a very sweet deal. It's probably better than anything else you could have chosen. But if you're good enough to get into a very top engineering school, then you're probably also good enough to do well in other lucrative careers.</p>
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The bottom line is that if you just barely graduated from high school and can only get into a low-tier school, then graduating with an engineering degree and getting that 40-50k starting job is a very sweet deal
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<p>What's a low-tier school? Are there some rough cut-offs or some sort?</p>
<p>Note that a PhD puts you in much better shape at an average of 20k more per year starting salary compared to a BS on average, according to the US Dept. of Labor. It also depends largely on your engineering concentration, with median earnings of agricultural engineerings at $66,030 compared to the $98,380 of a petroleum engineer.</p>
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I would actually say precisely the opposite - that engineering is a fantastic option if you can only get into a low-ranked school. That's because of the simple fact that engineering students from top-ranked schools don't make significantly more than engineering students from lower-ranked schools. Yes, there usually is a difference, but that difference is relatively small, i.e. less than 10%.
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<p>i don't think you can readily say that there is no significant difference - this is an average of the population, where just a little difference could mean a lot. we don't know the standard deviation or skewness of the populations...so you can't really jump to such a conclusion.</p>
<p>Well, if someone has a degree from a lower ranked school with a starting offer of 60k, compared to an MIT grad with an offer of 66k, the MIT grad will not feel that he's getting paid for what he's worth. I think it's fair to say that this amount is insignificant, especially if the MIT grad spent a lot more money on tuition, which can take a bit of time before the extra 6k can make up for the tuition.</p>
<p>toxic, you're trying to interpret "significant" as a statistical term, which is not what it was meant to mean. The difference between starting salaries for a student from a top engineering school and a mediocre school is a lot less than the difference between a top law school and a mediocre law school.</p>
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What's a low-tier school? Are there some rough cut-offs or some sort?
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<p>No cut-off, it's a fuzzy line. But generally, I would say something in the lower 25th percentile. </p>
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i don't think you can readily say that there is no significant difference - this is an average of the population, where just a little difference could mean a lot. we don't know the standard deviation or skewness of the populations...so you can't really jump to such a conclusion.
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<p>I don't mean significance in a purely * statistical* sense. Obviously if you want to use statistical arguments, then a two-sample t-test will probably reveal that the populations of the two means are significantly different. </p>
<p>But we have to keep in mind that significance in a statistical sense is not the same thing as significance in a *real world * sense, and it is the latter with which I am concerned. The former simply concerns itself with populations and/or population features that indicate differences that are unlikely to have occurred through pure chance. The latter is far more important and deals with what to do with the information that you have. </p>
<p>For example, if I told you that it was proven to be statistically significant that a particular kind of diet does indeed cause weight loss in a year, but only by 1 pound a year , then that is hardly a result that is significant in a real-world sense, as let's be honest, nobody is going to diet just to lose 1 pound in a year. However, if I ran another study that doesn't indicate statistical significance (i.e. because I don't have a large sample size), but that seems to indicate that another diet causes subjects to lose 1 pound * a week*, then that is a result that is significant in a real-world sense even though I haven't (yet) shown statistical significance. </p>
<p>{Incidentally, this gets to the heart of one of the fundamental criticisms of inferential statistics. The truth of the matter is that the statistical null hypothesis is almost always false in the sense that you can find statistically significant differences in any two populations as long as you have large enough sample sizes. What really matters is not that you find some statistically significance difference, but whether you find a difference that actually matters in the real world.} </p>
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Well, if someone has a degree from a lower ranked school with a starting offer of 60k, compared to an MIT grad with an offer of 66k, the MIT grad will not feel that he's getting paid for what he's worth. I think it's fair to say that this amount is insignificant, especially if the MIT grad spent a lot more money on tuition, which can take a bit of time before the extra 6k can make up for the tuition.
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<p>What is even worse is if that MIT engineering grad ends up with a starting salary that is actually * below* the national starting average for that engineering discipline. This has actually happened in some years for some disciplines. Then that grad will rightfully ask why he studied so hard to get into and graduate from MIT only to end up with a salary that is worse than others.</p>
<p>Is Florida State University a low tier engineering school?</p>
<p>yes, but fsu still gets some good recruiting</p>