<p>Yeah the closest mountains are the Smokies which are a good 3 hour drive through lands where dentists could not make a living.</p>
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<p>It’s really not like that – athletics is a huge part of campus life – but seeing as the OP would hate Georgia Tech for its location I will decline to elaborate further.</p>
<p>So places like Berkeley/MIT would be out. Duke is an odd suggestion even if the OP didn’t have a bad visit. The OP mentioned “nanotech” but Duke has no chemE. Only BME is considered a first-rated department there. I normally would suggest my alma mater, Northwestern, but the engineering students there have <em>very</em> busy and demanding schedule.</p>
<p>@Sam Lee: Drudgery means different things to different people. My point was that I don’t want to take a bunch of mandatory courses filled with hundreds of idiots that I will never use later on. Very demanding academics is not something that bothers me - I would relish it.</p>
<p>As an example, two classes in my schedule this year are AP Calculus AB and French III. Calculus is far more demanding than French, but I don’t find it nearly as tedious because I enjoy the subject and have smart and engaging classmates. French, while easier, is something I don’t care about and half of the class is unbelievably stupid.</p>
<p>I hate to break it to you but in engineering class discussions are rare. I doubt you’ll have much time to assess how smart and engaging your classmates are. The vast majority of classes will be you paying attention for the full 50-90 minutes with a few questions along the way.</p>
<p>Have you looked at Clemson or Virginia Tech? I know that you don’t like the South with the weather but the school’s are great engineering schools. Virginia Tech has a top 10 engineering school and Clemson is going to be in the top 20 public colleges next year or the year after and is a good engineering school.</p>
<p>@Erin’s Dad: Yes. We are well off and my grandparents have left a decent amount for college. Still, I don’t want to totally break the bank. Financial aid would only be needed at more expensive schools.</p>
<p>@gthopeful: There may not be discussion in class, but unless the dorms are titanium cubes of isolation, the overall willingness to discuss and think outside of class is important. Party animals and introverts are both undesirable classmates.</p>
<p>@pierre0193: VT is a very good school, and I might add that to my list. I have family in Virginia so visits there might coincide with a tour of the campus.</p>
<p>@Sam Lee: That sounds really interesting. Northwestern would be a reach, but perhaps something to consider.</p>
<p>Haha! Easy if you do what USC did with the calculation of % faculty as NAE members. Let’s look at the fraction instead of percentage just to keep this simpler:</p>
<p>So NAE membership fraction = #NAE members who are full-time faculty / #full-time faculty</p>
<p>For the numerator, USC counts full-time faculty but that’s not where it stops. It also counts emeritus ones (I found two other schools made similar “error” among the top-30 schools or so). But wait, there’s more: it even counts the ones that have <em>never</em> been full-time faculty before. Some examples: Danny Cohen was a former researcher; Albert A. Dorman did his master there; Paul Kern is a retired 4-star general who was an adjunct professor (usually part-time non-salaried, non-tenure track); Alfred E. Mann is a trustee on board of Alfred Mann Institute; Wanda M. Austin is listed as “research professor”, who has no teaching obligation; in fact, she probably doesn’t spend much time at USC, teaching or research because she is president and CEO of Aerospace Corporation with 4,000-employees under her. </p>
<p>For the denominator, USC somehow got it correct and doesn’t include the emeritus and the ones that were never full-time faculty before. Had they made the same error like they did for the numerator, the overall number would still be inflated but to a lesser extent. It’s kinda of funny how it works out to their maximum advantage. If this is an intentional manipulation, they are certainly playing it to full-extent and not shy about it. The end result is that while Berkeley/Stanford/MIT each has about half-dozen newly elected NAE members each year while USC isn’t anywhere close to that, they have about the same fraction of NAE membership as USC!!!</p>
<p>I don’t understand Sam, how does the number of NAE members directly relate to the quality of an engineering education, you can do this for many different organizations.</p>
<p>USC is a good engineering school but definitely not top 10. The graduate programs can be considered in the top 15 schools though</p>
<p>My top 10 engineering schools would be:</p>
<p>MIT
Caltech
UC-Berkeley
Stanford
Rose-Hulman
Harvey Mudd
Georgia Tech
Illinois
Michigan
Franklin W. Olin College Of Engineering</p>
That number is 7.5% of the rating for grad schools in engineering. You’re right though it has next to nothing to do with quality of education because let’s face it undergrad engineering isn’t rocket science and good researchers aren’t always good teachers.</p>
<p>I don’t believe NAE membership has any significant impact on undergrad education either.</p>
<p>I was just explaining the inconsistency between what menloparkmom said (USC has one of the top 10 rated schools of engineering in the US) and what UCBChemEGrad said (none of their individual engineering departments rank in the top 10). Menloparkmom referred to the overall engineering ranking while UCBChemEGrad referred to individual engineering departments ranking. I wondered just like UCBChemEGrad did; perhaps the chemE thing makes us think alike. There was a parallel question: why is its peer assessment score low if its NAE memberships fraction is reportedly this high? Being inquisitive and investigative, I did some work to uncover the “secret”.</p>
<p>This is a little late, but I’ll expand for you on Purdue from an Indiana POV:</p>
<p>It’s one of the ugliest campuses I’ve ever seen. It is truly hideous. Add to the fact that Indiana is pretty hot in the summer and pretty cold in the winter and it’s not a great place. The engineering program is top class, but that is it. My sister went to Purdue and was not overly impressed. The scene just doesn’t mesh well. There is not a lot of open ground, it’s a lot of closed area, no real area to let loose. It’s huge and it feels that way.</p>
but here are some of the highlights:
Another article on this: <a href=“