Good academic/music schools?

<p>Boston University has a fine music department...a conservatory type program within the university setting. Their violin teachers are excellent. BU also has an outstanding engineering program. BUT (and this is a big BUT) it would be very very difficult, if not impossible to pursue music performance and engineering at the same time. Both are extremely rigorous and time consuming majors with very few elective courses. As pointed out above, music courses (many of which give you only one credit) meet for hours a week. Ensembles, lessons, studio class, chamber music, and practicing will consume any available hours a student "thinks" he/she might have. Engineering majors have very full courseloads. If you don't start taking your engineering courses as a freshman, it is unlikely you will graduate with an engineering degree in four years. There ARE degrees that can be double majors...but I don't think engineering is one of them. Music performance probably is another that is not easy to do as a double major.</p>

<p>For math/engineering with music as a primary high-level ec (or with a minor/certificate in music), Princeton could be great. There are many conservatory-level musicians in the orchestra, and there are private lessons, concerto competitions and solos etc., that might be what you are looking for.
You can probably find an article on a google or Daily Princetonian search about the Carpenter siblings who studied at Juilliard and the Manhattan School, if I'm remembering correctly, and chose Princeton over those and Curtis, and so on. (Violin and viola.)
Math and engineering with ec music opportunities:check out MIT, too.</p>

<p>Mom-
You are quite right. Bloomington does not have engineering. The eng school is in Indianapolis.</p>

<p>For Violin and Engineering:
Carnegie Mellon University
Johns Hopkins University
Northwestern University
Rice University
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Rochester
University of Southern California</p>

<p>Eastman School at U of Rochester has about 40 dual degree students. They generally graduate in 4 years but they have to work hard. There are a few who do the music performance/engineering dual degree in 4 years.</p>

<p>It is true that Eastman has a reasonable number of dual degree students. According to my son who is a student there, many of the dual degree students are students majoring in musicology, not performance. He says it is extremely difficult for string students to dual degree at all let alone do it in 4 years.</p>

<p>There are performance majors with dual degrees in engineering and other subjects who finish in 4 years. I am not sure about strings in particular. My impression is that most dual degree performance majors finish in four.</p>

<p>MIT has a superb music department, headed by the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer John Harbison, who teaches freshmen. Lots of students come over from Harvard to study there. I don't know how they coordinate performance studies, though, but I would be willing to bet that your particular situation is not especially unusual.</p>