<p>Somewhat “odd” list of schools. I don’t know your stats but if you can get in to UMD-CP engineering program (it’s an LEP as you probably know), I think that’s a good choice. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry about PR ranking stuff. If you (consistently) do the things on the list, you won’t make it thru engineering school anyway.</p>
<h1>15 Lots of Hard Liquor — Are you a heavy drinker?</h1>
<h1>20 Lots of Race/Class Interaction – Are you a racist?</h1>
<h1>12 Most Politically Active Students – If you are a lib (name me a college kid who isn’t) you’ll be right at home at Maryland (3rd most liberal state after CA and MA)</h1>
<h1>17 Party Schools – Engineering students shouldn’t have that much free time</h1>
<h1>8 Financial Aid Not So Great – Name me a state school that does</h1>
<h1>7 Students Study the Least — Are you one of these types?</h1>
<h1>14 2012 Top Entrepreneurial Programs: Undergraduate</h1>
<h1>9 Best Athletic Facilities – Chances are you are not a division I Football/Basketball Player</h1>
<p>Point is — I don’t see how any of these factors determine where you spend the next four years of your life</p>
<p>Sunwardflyer, I certainly understand your concerns about the party reputation on campus. I would by lying to you if I said we didn’t have the same concern. We are a very conservative Christian family, who yes, even homeschooled through high school! Our son visited several schools, but UMD’s program seemed superior. He felt this was a good choice for him. The partying atmosphere is certainly prevalent, yet as PeterW said, there really isn’t time for it if you are going to make it in engineering, particularly if you do one of the honors programs. While our son isn’t thrilled about some of the effects of excessive partying on campus, he is thrilled with UMD’s computer engineering program. He certainly found a good group of kids who take their schoolwork seriously and they frequently study together. So yes, there are kids who don’t study enough on campus. In engineering however, many of them don’t make it. Interestingly, as far as PeterW’s comment about the liberal political views of students on campus, on many issues I think my son has become even more conservative than when he first started at MD. Good luck in your application process!</p>
<p>Wow, what a turnout! I guess I’ll go down the list…</p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad, you’re advice is extremely valuable! I know what to cross off my list now. I still have concerns about Tufts and Rochester though because they’re not generally schools people think of when they think of engineering schools. Perhaps I’ll remove those schools from my consideration and focus on schools with more rigorous engineering programs. I think I may have put Lafayette on my list instead of Lehigh by accident.</p>
<p>@FromMD and @PeterW, the reason that I’m considering these rankings is because I don’t want to be living with that type of crowd for four years. But according to davenmame’s son, it seems like I may not have to worry about such exposure as an engineering student which is very reassuring–thank you, davenmame.</p>
<p>I’m not particularly concerned with politics even though my family is 100% conservative. I’m more interested in the quality of education I will receive.</p>
<p>Rochester is a smaller school but has good hands on reputation for engineering, small town college feel relatively speaking, and some interesting engineering programs i.e. optics related due to Kodak being there.</p>
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<p>Here’s the deal: this is college and you are an adult now. You make your own decisions. Just because a school has a party atmosphere (and mind you, basically every school has a party atmosphere) doesn’t mean you have to let yourself get sucked into it. Plenty of students go to major party schools and never party, and if that is your thing, you will find plenty of like-minded individuals to befriend. If you don’t want to party, then don’t. It’s as simple as that. Go to the school that you feel best works for you and be who you want to be, end of story.</p>
<p>What is your reason for eliminating OOS publics from your search? Is it cost or distance? There are a number of excellent OOS public universities with tremendous engineering programs that would be less expensive than CMU (and just as prestigous) and the other private universities you mentioned.</p>
<p>I should point out that there is some benefit to the less rigorous schools like Rochester and Tufts in that their students are probably less likely to totally dump engineering altogether when the going gets tough. At some of the top public schools it’s pretty Darwinian. If you might be the kind of student that might get weeded out, I wouldn’t totally rule out Rochester and Tufts. You might consider WPI in that category too. </p>
<p>The rigor only helps if you can handle it. It’s a good thing to ask students when you visit. How hard is it to do well? At the more rigorous private schools, there is often much more academic support than at public schools. That’s often what your money is buying and it might be worth it.</p>
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<p>Do you have any actual evidence to support your claims here?</p>
<p>I see these less rigorous/more rigorous schools comments far too often on this forum, but the posters never provide evidence that supports any of them. It’s all just a bunch of handwaving as far as I’m concerned…</p>
<p>My guess, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that you assume these schools are less rigorous because you quickly googled the average SAT/ACT scores and acceptance rates of the “less rigorous schools”, compared them to MIT or Caltech, and extrapolated from there. </p>
<p>Schools can be plenty rigorous AND not have top-end admitted student body stats, much to your disbelief, I’m sure. Purdue is just one fine example of this…</p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad, if you don’t mind telling, what research are you doing? On your phone screens, what kind of questions are you asking? How are you determining whether a candidate is competitive?</p>
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<p>Fractalmstr, my anecdotal evidence is both from resumes, interviews, phone screens, interns from my position as an engineering manager, and while looking for engineering colleges for my D2, actually talking to professors and representatives of the school. I went to the Tufts Engineering Open House and Admissions Dan who posts on in the Tufts group, clearly explained what Tufts engineering was and what it wasn’t. </p>
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<p>You are wrong. It’s from many years of experience working and hiring engineers from many schools. </p>
<p>Purdue is a great school, of the highest caliber. They are the quintessential example of a school that is much easier to get in than to get out. </p>
<p>We recruit there and there are several Purdue grads in my group. They tell me that Purdue admits many students who can’t handle it. One guy told me that there are basically two groups of students, the group clustered around a 2.5 GPA who are just hanging in there, and a group clustered around a 3.5 GPA who really get it. I don’t think Purdue has quite the same level of support (free tutoring) as you might find at some of the richer privates though. </p>
<p>Chardo, on my phone screens I try to assess interest in my area, I ask about certain courses that they took and try to roughly assess how much they learned. I discuss some of the things I’m working on and see if they understand it or have good questions or any related experience. I can garner a lot from their questions. I review some of their experience and ask them to explain to me what they were doing and try to assess the depth and level of difficulty. I try to probe as deep as I can to see if they are laboring or enjoying the discussion. I try to assess the extent to which they are curious. Why did they take this approach (“because my advisor said so” is not as good of an answer as “you know I asked my advisor the same question and he said Reason 1 and Reason 2, etc”). You’d be surprised how few people ask why when told to do something. Did they consider this or that, what do you think would happen if you did this or that, etc. Maybe they will think out loud for me and I can see how they think. Basically, I try to have as deep of a technical discussion as possible over the phone with nothing to write on (which admittedly can only be so deep). </p>
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<p>To go from a phone screen to an interview, I need to be satisfied that they likely have enough capabilities to risk wasting the time of a whole lot of valuable people who will interview them and grill them. The interview process assesses the extent to which they would fit into the group and can quickly be a net positive - i.e., that the value of their work output would exceed the value of the time investment that their mentor will have to make in getting them spun up and productive.</p>
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<p>Thank you for clarifying.</p>
<p>What you’re saying here somewhat contradicts what you’ve said earlier though, and sheds light on a very important point - you can’t necessarily discern a candidate’s level of competence simply by looking at how selective the school was that admitted him/her. The reality is that some schools have very rigorous programs that do not align with their entrance stats. As a result, these schools often have lower graduation rates compared to schools that admit students with higher stats. Nonetheless, those students who do stick it out and graduate with good grades have shown that they can handle the rigor and are dedicated.</p>
<p>Purdue is just one prime example here… there are many others, including my undergraduate school.</p>
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<p>I never said that you could, though people in the finance industry often do. </p>
<p>What I’ve said in the past is that going to a very rigorous school (like Purdue) and doing well necessarily provides the candidate with high standard of excellence that one doesn’t often find at an ordinary directional state university.</p>
<p>Thank you for all of your contributions, everyone. I think I can conclude that I’m looking for a rigorous engineering program. I think that I can move Lafayette College, Stevens Tech, Tufts, and Rochester to my safety school list.</p>
<p>Now, I’d like to bring the out-of-state (OOS) colleges to the table. The reason that I didn’t have them listed before was because of cost–they tend to have higher tuitions, but as lvvcsf stated,</p>
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<p>Out-of-State College List (Alphabetically ordered):
[ul]
[<em>]Georgia Institute of Technology
[</em>]Purdue University
[li]SUNY University at Binghamton[/li][li]The College of New Jersey[/li][li]University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign[/li][/ul]</p>
<p>The College of New Jersey and University at Binghamton are italicized because I’ve never heard of them as being renowned engineering schools, yet they showed up on my college matches based on selectivity and location. What do you guys think of these schools in terms of list in terms of rigor and quality?</p>
<p>Another reason that I want to avoid OOS schools is because UMD is my state university and from my understanding, it’s engineering program is of a similar caliber of these OOS schools (Georgia Tech and Illinois in particular).</p>
<p>In addition, I’d like to thank ClassicRockerDad, Chardo, and fractalmstr for their invaluable discussions that will surely help engineers looking for high-quality jobs and students conducting their college searches.</p>
<p>SUNYs are relatively cheap (even for out-of-state), but the ones most noted for engineering are Stony Brook and Buffalo.</p>
<p>What about NCSU and Minnesota, which are also relatively cheap?</p>
<p>The three un-italicized schools are absolutely top notch. I don’t know enough about the other two to say for sure. We had a summer REU student in our lab this year who was from TCNJ, and he seemed reasonably intelligent, and I have a friend who graduated from Binghamton who just finished his PhD at Caltech and he is incredibly smart, but I don’t know if he is just an outlier or not. Those are my two only experiences with those two schools.</p>
<p>Your list seems to have a lot of competitive admissions schools. If you have very high stats etc and can afford them, that’s fine. If not, add more choices.</p>
<p>Binghamton students are almost all incredibly smart. It is the top SUNY school. It is not particularly known for engineering, but their engineers are often recruited for business. As the top public school in the home state of the world’s financial capital, that’s understandable.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info everyone!</p>
<p>Whether or not Tufts is a priority for you is one thing, but you really can’t consider a school that admits as low of a percentage as they do and charges as much as they do (offering zero merit aid), either an admissions safety or a financial safety.</p>
<p>I second the mention of WPI. My son visited every private school on your list plus Dartmouth, Brown, Bucknell, Olin and Lehigh. He’s a very competitive candidate. Of all, only two East Coast schools survived, WPI and Lehigh. WPI really spoke to him. It will likely be his top choice even considering that he’d be giving up a financial package at RPI worth a minimum of $60k.</p>
<p>I can say this, if you can afford it, go visit. It makes a huge difference. Go where you see yourself thriving, both as a student AND as a college age kid. Don’t go to the school because you think it’ll provide the most impressive bumper sticker or Facebook post.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>