<p>How is Harvey Mudd's "general engineering" different from engineering specialities offered at oher schools? Do a majority of the students join HMC with a plan to do their MS? What are the prospects for a Mudd student (with a decent GPA) who choose not to do MS? What industries hire these graduates.</p>
<p>I know one thing about it: it is DIFFICULT.</p>
<p>i feel like rocketDA and AtomicFusion would be of much help to this question…</p>
<p>Mudd attempts to produce generalists by addressing a good amount of the mathematical bases for various areas of engineering. This is coupled with a lot of systems emphasis (3 required courses) allows students to think of fluid, electrical, and mechanical systems in the systems domain. You’ll find sophomores are exposed to fourier transforms, filters, bode diagrams, and basic system analysis. These skills are enhanced by advanced system classes (required) which get into Laplace tranforms, FIR/IIR filters, control optimization (root locus), and state space controllers (such as kalman filter).</p>
<p>Additional classes required for graduation are electrical (analog circuits), continuum mechanics, experimental engineering, chemical engineering, digital/computer engineering, materials science, and 3 semesters of clinic (applied research for a company).</p>
<p>The curriculum is quite difficult (especially for engineers) but can be quite rewarding. We have quite excellent placement into top grad schools and very top engineering jobs. </p>
<p>Industries that hire mudders are quite varied. I (among many of us) work in aerospace. My company has an “unabashedly extreme” hiring bar and they seem to like mudders enough to keep hiring from Mudd, even though only a few “new grads” are hired a year. Most have MS or PhD though we seem to be able to hold our own with just a BS.</p>
<p>Hope that helps…</p>
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<p>The first of these statements explains the second.</p>
<p>The biggest difference between undergraduate coursework and graduate coursework (and thus the engineers produced by each) is mathematical level. Traditional undergraduate courses give you a mathematical basis for things, but they are much more concerned with teaching you the physics and how to apply it so that you can apply it better in industry. Graduate courses, in their endeavor to teach the student the material at a deeper level, is much richer in mathematics.</p>
<p>I suspect your company, based on their hiring profile, likes to have a high level of mathematical acuity in its engineers. Based on that first statement, I would surmise that the somewhat unorthodox approach to undergraduate education helps bridge that gap between typical B.S. engineers and M.S./Ph.D. engineers enough so that your company is willing to hire them.</p>
<p>You might also imagine that fewer HMC engineers go on to jobs such as manufacturing jobs since that is more of a purely applied discipline, whereas aerospace is more theoretical. Admittedly, I don’t have numbers to back that claim up, I just have intuition.</p>
<p>rocketDA / BoneH3ad, Thanks very much for the detailed explanation</p>