<p>How good is Harvard in terms of undergraduate engineering courses?</p>
<p>If you can get into Harvard and pay for it you’d be better off going to Stanford, Princeton or MIT for engineering.</p>
<p>You can find an assessment of how Harvard ranks in engineering here …</p>
<p>[Rankings</a> ? Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences](<a href=“http://www.seas.harvard.edu/our-school/facts-history/rankings]Rankings”>http://www.seas.harvard.edu/our-school/facts-history/rankings)</p>
<p>Wherever you get in, it is critical that you VISIT the campus and make up your own mind based upon what you deem important.</p>
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<p>That presumes you can get in. I know people who went to Harvard who were rejected from those other schools.</p>
<p>Harvard is not generally seen as prestigious for engineering.</p>
<p>It’s still more prestigious than the vast majority of other engineering schools.</p>
<p>I believe it’s a pretty small program, so I’m not sure how much depth you’ll get in terms of curriculum. Here’s the engineering course list (I think): [HERS</a> Output](<a href=“http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/Courses/EngineeringSciences.html]HERS”>http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/Courses/EngineeringSciences.html) . Looks pretty good to me, but I have no clue how often, for example, those special topics classes are offered.</p>
<p>^^
Agree, its not a bad school to study engineering at… but definately doesn’t have the same prestige in engineering as it does in say political science.</p>
<p>yeah, I would say Caltech and MIT are where you should be looking at if you want a strong engineering/science program. Georgia Tech is also good, if you’re looking for a slightly easier admit</p>
<p>On Facebook, 17 Cal freshmen engineering students have also been accepted at Harvard. As for why they turned down Harvard for Cal, I don’t know. I suspect those students must have been accepted at Harvard Engineering.</p>
<p>USNWR (I know…) ranks Harvard 33rd for undergrad engineering. Berkeley is ranked 2nd/3rd, for half the cost. I presume that’s why students are turning down Harvard.</p>
<p>^ Program choice must also have played a role in the school selection process, I guess. For example, the EECS program at Cal is perhaps the most oversubscribed program there and everyone who’s on that program has also have offers from elite privates and ivies. So, why they’ve chosen to attend Cal over those top privates that also offered them slots, I think the answer is quite obvious that they’ve chosen Cal because it has one of the best if not the best EECS programs in the nation.</p>
<p>I’ve been trying to track down where those Harvard accepted students who didn’t enroll are now. lol… FB is a really good tool to locate some of them, though a substantial number of those people can’t be found on that site. </p>
<p>Of the ones I’ve seen, there were 2 who went to Rice and 4 to Wharton. I suspect that the bulk of those students are at Yale, Stanford, Princeton and MIT. I suspect the top State Universities have a few of those students as well. I was surprised there was one guy who chose to attend BYU (that school for the Mormons in the State of Utah) over Harvard. I felt sad for the kid.</p>
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<p>…or so they claim. </p>
<p>To be clear, I’m sure there are some students who do indeed turn down Harvard for Cal engineering. This is just a general statement regarding the veracity of statements people make about themselves on Facebook. Heck, I know a guy on Facebook who claims (jokingly) that he has turned down every single Ivy, and Stanford, and MIT, all for his local community college.</p>
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<p>Is that supposed to be a shot at the Mormons?</p>
<p>MORMONS!!! FTW!!! MORMONS > HARVARD!!! xD</p>
<p>If you should go to Princeton instead. Similar Ivy experience and much better ranked for engineering.</p>
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<p>Okay now this is simply inaccurate lol. Most of my best friends are all in the EECS department at Cal and were not able to get into elite schools (read: Ivies, Stanford, Duke, MIT, Chicago). RML, Berkeley is a good school, and as a California resident, I am proud to have such an amazing school in my state… but really, stop over-inflating it.</p>
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<p>I would actually argue that the Harvard engineers might actually garner a better engineering education than do the Cal or the Princeton engineers, even in EECS. How so? Harvard undergrads enjoy access to the entire MIT course catalog through cross-registration, a tremendous advantage that no other school enjoys. The engineering resources at Harvard combined with the clearly immense engineering resources at MIT clearly outclasses that of Princeton or Cal. </p>
<p>Now, to be fair, cross-registration is not without its hassles. You have to commute from Harvard to MIT, but given the deep transportation links between the two campuses, I don’t know that that commute is significantly more burdensome than, say, the commute from Berkeley’s Clark Kerr dorm to Soda/Cory/McLaughlin/Davis Halls. Put another way, the Kendall Square Red Line T-stop is closer to the MIT Stata Center than the Berkeley BART station is to Soda. Furthermore, it is prohibited to cross-register more than half of your courses in any given semester. (Although, anybody who wants to fill more than half of his semester load with MIT engineering coursework is insane anyway. Even many MIT engineering students refrain from doing so.) Nevertheless, it is quite clear that Harvard and MIT operate in a cheek-to-jowl mode that provides an extensive engineering education for any Harvard student who wants one. </p>
<p>Now of course that begs the question of why that Harvard engineering student, rather than simply access MIT through cross-registration, didn’t just go to MIT instead. To that, again, I would say that that presumes that he had actually been admitted. I know some Harvard students who cross-registered at MIT who candidly admitted that they were rejected from MIT, and so if they wanted to access MIT resources, they had to do so through Harvard.</p>
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<p>I concur: I too can think of quite a few Berkeley EECS students who didn’t get into any of the top private schools. </p>
<p>The top 25% of Berkeley EECS students are highly competent students - perhaps even the top 50%. But that still leaves the bottom 50% who, frankly, are lucky to have been admitted to EECS at all. Heck, I would argue that the bottom 10-25% of the EECS students (i.e. the ones who are on academic probation, or close to it), are lucky to have been admitted to Berkeley in any major.</p>