Deciding between Miami of Ohio or Syracuse for Engineering-Undecided. Size is similar. Both are somewhat party schools, not my son’s vibe, and greek is probably not his thing, but he is comfortable with hanging with kids who drink, etc. , Both are cold weather schools…the latter is more so, but he seems Ok with that. Both are a bit far from home (Virginia), and he seems OK with that too. An additional concern is, given the attrition rate with engineering students, how good is the general reputation across the board with other majors. It is so hard now with incoming freshman forced to pick a major upon entry, versus, in my day, given until second semester of the sophomore to decide. If he doesn’t like engineering, business at Miami is almost impossible to transfer into (3.5 GPA) and Syracuse relies on some ‘committee’ review of first year grades and ‘Leadership,etc’. Is Economics hard to transfer into at either school? He is not a Humanities/English kind of guy, and a math/physics major probably would mean grad school, which is really not on his radar. Business, Econ seems a good plan B. He did get accepted to Providence (word is it is another party school) business (Finance) but Engineering there would be out of the picture. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
And costs are the same. Insights anyone?
Unless I’ve misread your post he doesn’t actually have a major now. He is an undeclared student enrolled in the College of Engineering. I don’t know about these 2 schools, but at many engineering colleges you have to have a certain gpa to declare various majors. He should check to see if these schools have requirements like this, and if so how stringent are they.
I have mixed feelings reading this, or perhaps a sense of foreboding. Has he spent time looking into engineering to see if its really right for him? Talked with some engineers to understand what they do? Have an interest in some aspect of what engineers do that could guide his choice of field – build bridges, circuits, whatever? In other words, built up the motivation to want to see it thru?
The reason I bring this up is I think the reason many kids quit engineering (and the dropout rate is pretty high, about 1/2 by some accounts) is not that they can’t do the work but because they don’t have the motivation to push thru the classes. What makes this doubly troubling is that the classwork that you may expect to form the basis of his decision bears little relation to what engineers really do. Think of it as 4 years of hazing. In school a EE (for example) spends years solving differential equations and using Laplace transforms to analyze circuits but real engineers have software to do that; they are paid for their higher-level knowledge built on the math foundations they spent so many hours learning (and for the most part will never use again).
You, my friend, are spot on with my concern. He has taken an intro to engineering class which explores what the different types of engineering are and what they do. He is in AP Calc AB and AP Physics 2, and he seems to like these classes. . Looks like first semester at college includes physics, calc, perhaps chem, technical writing, another intro type engeering class, and Miami requires a core curriculum so English, etc. These schools are not MIT or Stanford …he could declare a major freshman year semester 2 ,or beyond, and even switch one or two years out, though may then have to most likely add on beyond year 4 or summer school. My concern is as you said, dropout rate. He is interested now, but many just change their mind when they go beyond the toe in the water. I guess, my question is to college and its program strength.