<p>evanescenteuphoria, good job with the SAT scores. I had very similar scores as you four years ago. Just one advice, don't under estimate the difficulties of your classes. I thought I could get a 4.0 without studying much and I was dead wrong. Right now I have a pretty good GPA, but if it wasn't for my first term freshman grade I would finish close to the top in my major.</p>
<p>evanescenteuphoria, you have good SAT scores, but don't take the freshman classes lightly. It is very difficult to get a 3.8+ in engineering. The SAT scores don't say much because they're obviously much much easier than the classes you'll be taking.</p>
<p>Yeah see the biggest problem will lie in your cockiness, evan. You say your scores are all that and a bag of chips but so was my ACT score not only one of the highest at my high school but one of the higher ones at my college. Guess what? Doesn't mean ****.</p>
<p>Not only will you meet others with the same scores as you but many who did better and some who got 800's on the math portion (especially in engineering). And then many others who didn't score as well but are more determined and more dedicated than you will be to doing well.</p>
<p>Many college students are overwhelmed not by their classes but more by the fact that they aren't the top anymore. I don't hear many kids complaining that their classes are so hard that even if they worked all night they still didn't get it (sometimes but not much). This phrase is much more common, "I wish I had more time to work on this. Everyone else is so smart. I just can't compete. In high school I taught my class how to do this crap." Now they are competing with everyone who taught their class how to do that crap. Everyone was at the top of their respective classes. It is very very indimidating and many can't get past that.</p>
<p>Also many can't get past the fact that a 60% could be very very good. If the average was a 40% with a low standard deviation. It can't possibly be an A if it isn't even passing. It freaks out a lot of the students. These are smart kids. None have ever felt stupid their entire lives. Engineering is an extremely HUMBLING major. If it isn't anything else it is definitely that.</p>
<p>In fact I found the title of this forum incredibly entertaining because I just had a convo with one of my friends. She went to an amazing high school in IL. She tested out of several classes with her APs (almost junior year as a freshmen) and got great scores on her ACTs and thought about going Ivy but didn't because she wanted college to be easy. So she went to the school that was the easiest to get into. U of I. U of I is like the holy grail to very low scoring school with only the smartest going there. At her school, she and almost all of her friends were able to be accepted, no problem. She said this, "I expected U of I to be so easy. I mean it was so easy to get into." I was like, "But U of I is one of the top schools in the nation for a reason." Just because it was easy to get into doesn't mean it's easy to get an engineering degree from." See the concept of acceptance rates is deceiving. Easy to get into does not = getting a degree or graduating easy. So take your acceptances and your scholarships with a grain of salt. They may be easy to get but they won't be easy to keep. You're gonna have to work for it. Don't just go expecting a degree in your hand in 4 years like high school with a good salary and job lined up. College isn't high school and the sooner prospective engineering grads learned this the better they would handle it once they got there.</p>
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Just because it was easy to get into doesn't mean it's easy to get an engineering degree from.
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<pre><code>This is very true. In the ECE department at UIUC, only 50% of people that start in the department leave with a degree in it, and only another ten percent graduate from another engineering discipline. These are students that average in the 30's on the ACT and all that jazz, and 40% of them never get through engineering. I'm not saying that all 40% couldn't cut it, there are obviously other reasons, but at least a lot of them couldn't handle it. I'm assuming statistics are similar with other UIUC disciplines and other good engineering universities in the country (although schools where you declare a major AFTER starting school may have a higher graduation rate...).
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<p>Also, from my observation, the students really excelling at my school aren't necessarily the ones that have high ACT scores. A lot of those people are so naturally smart that they never had to try to get good grades, and can't adjust to the college courses. The only person I know in EE with a 4.0 only got a 28 on his ACT. He had to bust his ass to get into the engineering department, and continues to bust his ass to get good grades. By the way, I neither have amazingly high ACT scores nor good grades, so these are just observations.</p>
<p>site where I found the number from above:
<a href="http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/abet/ce_b1.pdf%5B/url%5D">www.ece.uiuc.edu/abet/ce_b1.pdf</a></p>
<p>evanescenteuphoria,</p>
<p>I'm a parent but back in the day I scored 800 on SAT1 math, kind of a big deal back then. I thought I was a math genius.</p>
<p>Anyway as a freshman in engineering I learned there were kids WAY smarter than I in math. Your scores are great and congratulations but if you are "challenging" Cornell I'll put my $ on Cornell. SAT's don't mean a hill of beans from the first day of college onward (I eventually switched out of engineering).</p>