<p>So Columbia has the SEAS school
Is this better than the Cornell engineering school? which i heard was fantastic</p>
<p>Im really confused. Because SEAS is different from Columbia, the admit rate is higher, etc.. DOes it mean its easier to get in? And does this also mean Cornell has a different Engineering school as well?</p>
<p>Which schools have good engineering programs?
Sorry lots of questions!</p>
<p>Both Columbia and Cornell have excellent engineering programs.</p>
<p>There are Ivy League schools with excellent engineering programs, as noted above. But most of the best engineering programs are found elsewhere - Berkeley, Illinois, Purdue, Michigan, Georgia Tech, to name only a few.</p>
<p>And, if you want prestige without having to sacrifice quality of education, there’s always Stanford and MIT.</p>
<p>Cornell and Princeton are way above the rest of the Ivy league in terms of engineering. Penn is noticeably below that, but is very good in biomedical engineering specifically. The rest are all a step below that.</p>
<p>You’re forgetting MIT and Caltech–the gold standard of engineering schools.</p>
<p>Unless you get nice financial aid, I think it is a bad decision to go to an Ivy for engineering. Many, many employers prefer the state school grads.</p>
<p>How am I forgetting MIT and Caltech? The thread says Ivy League.</p>
<p>Cornell and Princeton offer the best engineering programs in the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Ivy league (at least Brown) engineers don’t go into “typical” engineering jobs as often. It’s a great option if you aren’t sure you want to be an engineer, or would prefer to use your engineering skills in a capacity other than working at a major corporation to design/improve mainstream products. At least at Brown, it seems like entrepreneurship is emphasized for more than at most other places, which produces a different kind of engineer.</p>
<p>Ahh ok thank you.</p>
<p>So when I apply, lets say to Columbia, do I first get accpeted, and choose to go to SEAS or do i need to seprately apply to SEAS and Columbia? Can I apply to both at once?</p>
<p>Same goes for Cornell, and Penn, and Brown, etc etc</p>
<p>At Columbia, Cornell, and Penn, you apply specifically to their Engineering school. You either are accepted to both or rejected to both. (It is very unlikely but possible that Cornell would reject you from engineering but accept you at a different school.) At Princeton and Brown, you apply as a BSE or Sc.B./AB candidate (respectively), which means you must write and extra essay about your passions for science and engineering. You will be accepted or rejected however to Princeton/Brown as a whole and there would be absolutely zero hassle should you decide to change majors to something outside engineering. At Harvard, there are no extra essays or anything, you just apply to Harvard College straight up. I don’t know for sure, but I think Yale and Dartmouth work the same way as Harvard.</p>
<p>As Buddy McAwesome implied in post #5, for bioengineering, Penn is the best in the Ivy League, and is among the top 5 or top 10 in the country (depending on the ranking).</p>
<p>For an engineering career other than bioengineering, Cornell and Princeton are the Ivy League leaders.</p>
<p>For business careers that make use of an engineering background, such as investment banking or consulting, programs like Penn’s are quite strong, especially when combined either formally (e.g., dual degree) or informally with courses in Wharton.</p>
<p>BuddyMc–I was addressing Greybeard, who listed the best non-Ivy engineering schools without mentioning MIT and Caltech.</p>
<p>Cornell has the best engineering program in the Ivy League. It is a quite demanding program with lots of problem sets and group projects. It is superior to Princeton in terms of diversity of offerings and resources. The SATs for Cornell engineers are only about 20-30 points below MIT. Cornell engineers are heavily recruited. I don’t know of a single student from my class who did not have something lined up, either job or grad school.</p>
<p>At Cornell, almost all graduates go into engineering. At some of the other Ivies, many engineering graduates go into other fields like banking, law, medicine. However, I do know some Cornell engineering graduates who went into medicine and banking.</p>
<p>Princeton also has a great engineering program. I think Cornell and Princeton are the best places for undergraduate engineering in the country. I chose Cornell over Michigan and Illinois. I think the student quality at the publics is a little lower and they were a little too large. However, I am now attending a flagship public for my PhD program. I thought Cornell was the optimum in terms of offerings, resources, and personal attention for undergrad. I did not apply to MIT or Caltech because I wanted a more well-rounded, traditional college experience.</p>
<p>As others have said, Penn and Columbia also have excellent engineering programs.</p>
<p>I totally agree with Collegehelp. If you are completely sure that engineering is your life passion, then maybe you would be better off at schools such as UC Berkeley, or MIT and Caltech, but if you aren’t sure, I would say that Cornell and Princeton have great engineering programs that can also provide non-engineering experience. These additional experiences can prove invaluable. </p>
<p>Of course, Cornell’s engineering is better than Princeton’s. :)</p>
<p>You must also look at what department within each engineering school.</p>
<p>Princeton’s Chemical Engineering Department, for instance, is currently ranked 6th in the country and during the last 40 years has been in the top five and many years #1 in the country.</p>
<p>to give you an idea about the quality of faculty in this department, of the 24 current faculty members in Princeton’s ChE. Department, there are 14 memberships in in the prestigious National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences.</p>
<p>Number of faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering</p>
<p>114 - MIT
92 - Stanford
77 - UC Berkeley
48 - Univ. of Texas
31 - CalTech
29 - Illinois
26 - Georgia Tech
25 - Princeton
25 - Cornell
25 - Carnegie Mellon
23 - USC
22 - UCSB
21 - Michigan
20 - UCSD
20 - Northwestern
19 - Harvard
19 - UCLA
19 - Wisconsin
18 - Purdue
16 - Columbia
16 - Univ. of Washington
16 - Minnesota
14 - Maryland
13 - Texas A&M
12 - Rice
11 - Virginia
11 - Unv. of Colorado
11 - Ohio State
10 - Lehigh
10 - Arizona
10 - Virginia Tech
9 - Univ.of Penn
9 - UC Davis
9 - Arizona State
9 - Penn State
8 - UC Irvine
8 - Rutgers
8 - Case Western
8 - NC State
7 - Johns Hopkins
7 - RPI
7 - Delaware
7 - Florida
7 - Utah
6 - Yale
6 - Iowa State
6 - UMass
5 - UNC
5 - Houston
5 - NYU
5 - Rochester
4 - Brown
4 - Drexel
4 - Kansas
3 - Duke</p>
<p>Cornell engineering is the strongest traditional engineering school.</p>
<p>At Columbia SEAS of which I am a recent grad, the students are exceptionally smart and the curriculum is extremely rigorous. Columbia’s SAT scores are slightly higher than MIT’s and Columbia SEAS’s sat scores are slightly higher than Columbia College’s, so Columbia SEAS is taking in some ridiculously smart kids (along with a 13% acceptance rate in a self-selecting pool of applicants). Students often have the option of working for a traditional engineering firm, but the smarter kids tend to self select into working in consulting, finance or a top computer firm (amazon, google, facebook, apple, microsoft). Columbia seas places extremely well in these fields and they pay very well out of college (more than traditional engineering firms) with great future earning potential in all (more than traditional engineering firms). So Columbia SEAS probably has only 30-40% work in actual engineering industry.</p>
<p>There are also those who go to med and law school and again they place very well. Like someone said about cornell, I know exactly two people in my engineering graduating class who aren’t entering a grad/professional school or beginning a job.</p>
<p>Princeton has more recognized departments and students to rival any school. Penn is a similar engineering school to Columbia, but I don’t think their stats (sat scores and acceptance rate) are quite as impressive. Penn SEAS definitely offers its students a huge number of job opportunities in finance and consulting.</p>
<p>Brown, Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard all have extremely few undergrad engineering majors. At Harvard most of the people who start out in engineering switch to social science and science majors.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the replies :)</p>
<p>What is selfselecting?</p>