<p>I'm planning on entering the field of chemical engineering, and my top choices so far, to all of which I have been accepted, are</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd
Case Western
Carnegie Mellon
University of Delaware- Honors
Columbia University SEAS.</p>
<p>HMC doesn't have a dedicated chemE program, but I'm enthralled at the prospect of studying engineering there and at the benefits HMC has to offer compared to the other schools I'm considering. However, I'd probably take extra courses to gear my experience towards chemE.</p>
<p>I wanted to know- does Harvey Mudd have a fair number of students who know their specific field of interest yet attend anyway? I spoke with Dr. Bright, the Chair of Engineering, earlier today, and he said of the ~80 engineering graduates, 40 enter industry and 40 then pursue graduate degrees. Of those who enter graduate school, half enter mechanical engineering and the majority of those remaining follow electrical, and the remainder of that enter chemical engineering.</p>
<p>Is Mudd's curriculum more geared towards those seeking to enter mechE, then?</p>
<p>Mudd's Engineering Deptartment's goal is to develop your problem-solving toolbox, so to speak. There are a few concepts every engineer shoud know but many universities and colleges do not cover these. </p>
<p>As an example, mechanical resonance and damping is very similar to electrical resonance and damping. Mudd will develop your mathematical and conceptual understanding of modeling, experimentation, data acquisition and analysis while providing an extremely hardcore approach to the mathematics behind it (core math typically takes 2 years to complete).</p>
<p>For someone like yourself, who is interesting in chemical engineering, you will have to also know basic electronics, systems and signals, and all sorts of stuff as well. I'm actually taking a chemical engineering course (required) right now and it is pretty neat. I, like you, will probably take heat transfer, incompressible flow, compressible flow, and much more in the future. I am not a chemical engineer though... I suppose my interests are in the aerospace field (more specifically propulsion, pyrology) yet I know (from experience in the real world) that these other overview classes are very important as well.</p>
<p>While one can make the argument that Mudd will not prepare for aerospace as well as somewhere with a focuses aerospace engineering major, I have two responses to this argument:
1) With the tools that Mudd gives you, becoming more focused in any specific field will not be difficult. Mudd's basis is a non-bs approach with all the math/physics/chemistry integrated into the curriculum. (Also, knowing how multiple systems work and interact makes you a strong candidate for technical leadership)
2) I promise you that some of the most remarkable design break-throughs in engineering will be through hybridization of technologies...quasi-cell structures that can be manipulated through electrical stimulation to morph to complex shapes and auto-repair... nucleothermal ion-induction high-thrust rocket engines with ISPs of ~20,000 sec... etc...</p>
<p>So, the curriculum is geared toward every facet of engineering. Now is the time to get a really strong foundation on the bigger picture of how all this stuff ties together (which is quite beautiful, actually) and not to be a narrow shrew.</p>
<p>So, relating to aerospace, I’ve taken Chemical and Thermal Processes, Fluids (incompressible flow), and Compressible Flow (in addition to most of those other courses that rocket mentioned + some more mechanical), and I have to say that “big STEMs,” in which you learn all about the conceptual understanding of resonance and damping, like rocket said, is the most helpful of all of them, and I feel like I’m more prepared than many of my fellow interns at the space company at which I’m working during the summer (lots of whom are aerospace majors at other colleges, no less). Really, I couldn’t agree more with what rocket said. 
I’ve never regretted coming to Mudd, but make sure you’re okay with more work than you want to do sometimes and a school size of ~800. Though there’re always the rest of the 5C’s to hang with :D</p>