<p>Well, that's very odd. I seem to be the only person that can't get onto the site. I've tried several times tonight. I don't have any problems going to any other site.</p>
<p>Can some of you tell me all about it? Where is it located.? I can't even find it on college board college search to find out that way.</p>
<p>Also, in my search for more info on engineering, I went to a website of a university in our state of NC where they have a good engineering program. Somehow I wandered onto a link from there and found where I could order a 3 dollar Pamphlet named "Engineering...Go For It!" It came in the mail yesterday. It is filled with wonderful information about all the different engineering fields and stories of young people that are in engineering school (male and female). Also, it has stories of well established engineers that tell their story. Gosh, made me wish I was young again and just starting out in the world and knew what I know now. How exciting!! You all have the world at your feet! :)</p>
<p>Olin College is in Needham, MA (near Boston). The first class will graduate this May. There are about 300 Olin students spread over the 4 classes (about 75 freshman enter each year). </p>
<p>Some princeton review info on Olin:
<a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/profiles/generalinfo.asp?listing=1037875<ID=1%5B/url%5D">http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/profiles/generalinfo.asp?listing=1037875<ID=1</a></p>
<p>If you have any specific questions I'd be happy to answer them and I'm sure the others would too.</p>
<p>On the Olin forum here on College Confidential, there was a lot of talk about a student-produced video about Olin, titled "Leading the Way." I'd highly recommend watching it on-line. You can find it with a Google search of the terms "leading the way" Olin video. </p>
<p>Here's a bit of overview info from the Olin site:</p>
<p>Official opening: Fall 2002</p>
<p>Current Enrollment: 286 Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors </p>
<p>Location: Needham , Massachusetts (14 miles west of Boston)</p>
<p>Programs: Undergraduate Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Engineering.</p>
<p>Curriculum : Interdisciplinary, project-based approach emphasizing entrepreneurship, liberal arts, and rigorous science and engineering fundamentals</p>
<p>Facilities : Projected 500,000 sq. ft. of academic, residential and administrative space on 70-acre site adjacent to Babson College; Phase 1 complete (300,000 sq. ft.); Phase 2 underway</p>
<p>Accreditation : Achieved candidacy with NEAS&C; Working toward full accreditation review by NEAS&C and ABET as soon as eligible</p>
<p>Student-to-Faculty Ratio : 9 to 1</p>
<p>Faculty : Acclaimed scholars and researchers with a commitment to teaching excellence</p>
<p>Admission : Highly selective; Outstanding achievement in coursework and testing; Special attention given to creativity, passion and enterprise</p>
<p>Scholarship Policy : Every admitted student receives a four-year, full tuition scholarship valued at approximately $130,000</p>
<p>Yeah, I have the freshmen veiw. We have a Becky has the sophomore veiw, and chrisd the parent veiw. </p>
<p>and glad to know it does get better.. ICB does drive me insane some days but having John in his thick accent ask "so all you have to do is get down and boogie?" while playing shoot the moon makes my day.</p>
<p>John is my advisor. He's awesome.</p>
<p>Salem, I'm going to approach this issue from a different viewpoint.</p>
<p>I'm going to suggest that if your daughter is looking at colleges, and her interests lean to the technical side, she investigate the female faculty ratio. It's one thing to develop camaraderie with one's classmates - and it's important that young women have a sufficient number of female classmates - but it's equally important that the leaders, the decision makers, the mentors, the role models be female also.</p>
<p>One of the things I like very much about my son's school, Harvey Mudd College, is that his two closest mentors are dynamic, brilliant women. [In case you're not familiar with it, HMC is a technical college with majors in engineering, math, science, and computers.] Ever since he came home on break, he's been talking about the new math prof, a woman out of Cornell and MIT (with perfect GPAs from both and already developing a rep as a fine teacher). The college bulletin we parents received this fall centered on the historic and current role women have played at HMC. I learned, for instance, that the first woman student enrolled in 1960 (when the school was only 5 years old and long before the Ivies and Seven Sisters went coed). Today, 6 of the 17 tenure-track engineering faculty are women, second in percentage only to Smith College. Of the college's total tenure-track faculty, 6/36 full professors, 7/18 associate professors, and 14/23 assistant professors are women. Those kinds of numbers speak volumes to me about a school's commitment to its women. </p>
<p>To quote HMC President Strauss: "Passing the 25% (female enrollment) barrier in the late 1990s seemed to bring our women students into their own. Whereas previously the best strategy for dealing with the rampant testosterone of the male majority appeared to be to 'go along to get along,' higher representation [of women] appears to have empowered our women to be women. Faculty and students alike have commented on the more positive, more respectful environment for living and learning."</p>
<p>Understand, I'm only trying to make a point, not shill for one particular school. I'm just passing along something I would consider closely were I a young woman looking into college today.</p>
<p>I was the little girl whose free time was spent in the basement at her dad's workbench trying to figure out a steering mechanism for a go-cart. I can still tell you, decades later, how it felt to be one of a tiny handful of females (read: 3) in the high school physics and calc classes or in college how it felt to be the <em>only</em> female in a Fortran class that filled a lecture hall. Like your daughter, I had a lot of interests. I wound up on the liberal arts side and never regretted it; but I wonder if things would have been different if I'd had one - just one - female mentor somewhere along the way in a science or math class.</p>
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Ok. Im one of those girls from ChrisD's daughters school.
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<p>Is it school policy to not release the name of the school in question? Are you a Farm recruit or something? Perhaps Olin is affiliated with the CIA....</p>
<p>ChrisD. Wow, how in the world do they offer free tuition to Olin? I've never heard of that before! That is great! How strict is the admission process? I still cannot get onto the web site. That is so strange.</p>
<p>Mudder's, you offer some wonderful food for thought there. A female mentor(s) would certainly mean all the difference in the world I would think. I've been doing a lot of reading and though the field has been male dominated, it is changing and there are some very accomplished women in the field. I would love for my daughter to have many women role models.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd sounds like a great school. Too bad it is on the other side of the country though. We live in North Carolina. I don't think I could send her off that far. It would be way too expensive for her to come back home frequently.</p>
<p>Coming from an all girls High School, there was definitely a big change shifting into the engineering world. As a Biomedical Eng. there are more females in that type of Eng. than say EE or ChemE even. I actually like that I am one of only a few girls. I have not experienced any discrimination from the guys but actually have recieved help. Most people worry about being only one of a few girls but once you enter the college life as an engineer it is something that you quickly get use to. If she is thinking Pre-med definitely go with biomedical engineering. It is a great field that is definitely fast growing. I know at Drexel for instance there are even different tracks within Biomed to concentrate in such as Tissue Eng., Neuro Eng., and Bioinformatics. Also make sure she checks out schools that are ABET accredited for BME as alot of colleges are not.</p>
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Also make sure she checks out schools that are ABET accredited for BME as alot of colleges are not.
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<p>I doubt that ABET accreditation matters for BME/BioE/biomechanicalE. After all, some of the top engineering schools like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley do not currently have accredited BME/BioE/biomechanicalE programs.</p>
<p>As discussed in another thread some schools that are not ABET accredited are viewed to be BME "lite" as not all the ABET requirements are neccessary. Of course at some Ivy leagues they would probably be including these courses and more anyway.</p>
<p>Each year there is a greater influx of girls into engineering and computer science programs. As these talented and capable female engineering students succeed in class, in internships, etc., overt and subtle discrimination will diminish. It isn't any different from the time, not too long ago (at least I can remember it), when women started to go into medical/law schools in large numbers. Over time, attitudes changed, and it isn't unusual anymore to see female doctors and lawyers. </p>
<p>But the point made above (by summer), about being isolated, is a good one. It would be good for your daughter to look not only at engineering schools, but also at schools that have sizable engineering departments as part of a larger university offering liberal arts. The larger the department, of course, the more girls in the program -- even with a 2 or 3 to 1 ratio. Also, if your daughter were to decide that she doesn't like engineering, she could transfer out and have many other academic options. And at a larger school, she will have plenty of opportunities in the dorm and through extracurricular activities to make friends with other girls.</p>
<p>Being a high school girl interested in engineering can get interesting. There are many, many opportunities available which pitch themselves to people like your daughter and are great fun to be in; on the other hand, there's a definite reaction to gender. Not a negative reaction, generally, but a sort of "Oh, my goodness! It's the rare engineericus femeninus - be careful not to scare it off!" which can become irritating. It really depends on where you are and who you're with. </p>
<p>Also, try things out in high school - two years until college, right? If there's a FIRST robotics team in your area, I'd recommend checking them out - it's a good opportunity during the school year, and can be a lot of fun. Internships during the summer are also good (and can be incredible experiences) - while they don't pay much (if anything), they can help show your daughter where her interests lie.</p>
<p>I love Jorge Cham.</p>
<p>I'll continue to keep reasonably mum on the rest of the subject, though... There are days when I'm exhausted to be one of only a small percentage of women in the grad program here, and chatting about it at length just makes me snitty. =)</p>
<p>High school was rough, seeing as how I was shipped off to the local boys' school with three other girls from the sister school to take AP Comp Sci and AP Physics C, and there was a fair bit of harassment, which is an uncommon experience for most, luckily. It was nearly the same situation as tomboy was in, seeing as how she went to the same school I did and went over to the boys' school for engineering classes as well. (I'm the 10%er in the civ eng grad program who talks tomboy down from her occasional trees, since I've been up in those trees as well! ;) ) Still, it's one of those things which makes you hypersensitive to any whiff of prejudice, even if it's not actually real prejudice. So, I've tried to stay out of these sorts of threads.</p>
<p>The only viewpoint that I push with regard to women in engineering is that we CAN, we SHOULD if we are so inclined, and the more of us that DO, the less weird and more commonplace it shall be. If you like engineering, go for it! It's a very cool field.</p>
<p>Personally, the engineering girls I know (myself included) all date engineering guys, and all is well with the world except that there are some sad engineering guys left out merely due to the ratio. If your daughter is thinking along the lines of dating some football player or other, she may have a problem due to being an engineer, but engineering guys tend to be very nice and well-paid to boot!
The only true problem with being a female engineer is constantly having to combat the notion that you are automatically less qualified than any of your male classmates. I've run into this in high school, even with the highest grades in the class... somehow the second highest (top MALE score) would get all the attention because i "didn't count."<br>
My advice is that if your daughter is sure of what she wants to do, encourage her to do it... it's a great field with great people. She can't go wrong.</p>
<p>(Aside: That's not to say that you <em>have</em> to date an engineer...! You can date whomever you want to date, engineer or no. =) My boyfriend is a very sweet and talented composer and conductor getting his doctorate in music, and we've been together for 5 and a half years now.)</p>
<p>Salem, my DD wants to major in mechanical engineering - has so far been accepted at UMich, Cornell, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, UDel - still waiting on Princeton. I was VERY impressed with Penn State's Women in Engineering Program. DD did a "sleepover" with a female engineering student, went to class, then DH and I joined for WEP breakfast. Panel was made up of very bright, articulate, attractive young ladies. All who wanted one had summer internships anywhere from NASA to GM to a plant in France. Some obtained internships between their freshman and sophomore years through mentoring of WEP. She was much more impressed with the WEP program at Penn STate than a similar one at Cornell, but much more impressed with the Cornell facilities. Only drawback for DD is Penn STate is in the backyard, so grass is always greener somewhere else!</p>
<p>Check it out:
<a href="http://www.engr.psu.edu/wep/%5B/url%5D">http://www.engr.psu.edu/wep/</a></p>
<p>note here from a father, who is an engineer, that has two daughters that are engineers. Oldest daughter was going to go to med school and started out as chem Engr pre med mainly because of a strong female high school role model that taught ap chem. Switched to mech engr and still did all the pre-med work but decided to do a masters in bio engineering instead. She will finish this semester. The youngest daughter graduates this spring in EE and will do grad school in EE.
With rare exception the engineering males did not give them any grief about being female. For the most part engineering males are oblivious anyway. The only reservation I had was with my oldest I should have had her explore a little harder other majors when she changed because now she had to pick up quite a few EE courses to fit into what she is doing in bio engineering with measuring brain waves in rats.
I think anyone with good math and science skills needs to go to engineering school and if then after they graduate they can decide to do something easier in life i.e. get the hardest degree first while you still have the brain cells.</p>
