<p>Yale is one of the top colleges in US, but does not feature in the best in Engineering. How is the program and how reputed is it?
Specially for electrical and computers.</p>
<p>Yale is one of the top five universities in the US but it does not have a strong engineering program. The engineering program at Yale is small and it has very few engineering faculty. Most of the faculty who teach engineering courses at Yale have joint appointments with other departments. On the other hand, their students and faculty are no doubt very bright. An undergraduate degree in engineering from Yale might provide adequate preparation for graduate school in engineering.</p>
<p>Why are you considering Yale for engineering when there so many better engineering programs? If you want to attend an Ivy to study engineering, consider Cornell. Cornell is very strong in electrical and computer engineerintg. Columbia, Princeton, and U Penn also have strong engineering programs. Many of the flagship public universities have excellent engineering programs (Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan in particular). Other private institutions with top engineering programs include Caltech, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Rice, and Northwestern. Carnegie Mellon is noted for its program in computer engineering.</p>
<p>According to US News... it's not up to par with MIT, UC Berkeley and Stanford.</p>
<p>Very bad idea. Yale is ranked roughly #40 for engineering at both undergrad and grad level. The top 10 engineering programs are MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CalTech, Illinois, Michigan, GaTech, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and Purdue. Texas, Princeton, and Wisconsin are not far behind. If you can get into Yale, then you can get into most of these 13 engineering schools. Some will make the argument that there are hundreds of engineering schools so even a ranking of 40 is fairly good. North Carolina State is ranked slightly higher than Yale. Would you consider going there?</p>
<p>It may seem like Yale's general prestige is so great that it will overshadow the fact that its engineering program isn't quite on a par with its liberal arts programs. Maybe to laypeople. But the engineering industry and the engineering grad schools know which are the top programs and they will certainly wonder why a high caliber student who was capable of getting into Yale would go there when there are far better engineering schools that were easier to get into.</p>
<p>yes you are right. Actually, being an international i was looking for a school which would provide good financial aid, as i cant afford more than 25000 per year. My profile is not ivy league type, but i could probably get admission in any institute below the ivies. Which institutes do u think are suitable for me??</p>
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But the engineering industry and the engineering grad schools know which are the top programs and they will certainly wonder why a high caliber student who was capable of getting into Yale would go there when there are far better engineering schools that were easier to get into.
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<p>In the case of employers, this seems to be sadly irrelevant. If you search through my old posts, I have demonstrated numerous times that the graduates of even the top engineering programs like Berkeley or Michigan do not get starting salaries that are terribly different from what engineering students from average programs like Kansas State or Michigan Tech get. So it seems to me that engineering employers don't really care that much about engineering program quality, otherwise, they would be paying the top program graduates better. </p>
<p>The same seems to hold true for engineering grad schools. What these grad schools care about is the quality of the individual student, not so much the quality of the program. For example, there aren't that many eng grad students at MIT who did their undergrad at Illinois, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Wisconsin, and so forth (relative to the number of grads that these programs produce). </p>
<p>And the fact is, many of the top engineering students don't really end up working as engineers anyway. For example, it has become something of a running joke at MIT that the best engineering students will not take engineering jobs, instead preferring to go to management consulting and investment banking. MIT is the best engineering school in the world, and even there, a lot of engineering students don't really want to be engineers. I think it is quite clear that Yale is a far better school to get into consulting and banking than is, say, Georgia Tech or Purdue. </p>
<p>Consider this quote from Time Magazine:</p>
<p>"Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: "It's marketed as--I don't want to say dead end but sort of 'O.K., here's your role, here's your lab, here's what you're going to be working on.' Even if it's a really cool product, you're locked into it." Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. "If you're an M.I.T. grad and you're going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day--as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that--it seems like a no-brainer." </p>
<p>Look, I wish it were true that employers and grad schools really cared about engineering program quality. But the truth is, they don't. Sad but true. I graduated near the top of my class from a highly ranked engineering program. Yet me and my other colleagues did not get salary offers that were significantly above the national average. I have detected no special advantage as far as getting into grad school. Nobody really seems to care. I wish it weren't true, but it is true.</p>
<p>bump it up...</p>
<p>As one potentially highly relevant measure, suggest go to school websites and count: # professors, and # courses actually being offered in the current semester, specifically in/by the engineering dept at Yale vs. other engineering schools/programs you might be thinking about. Breadth of available course offerings can literally dictate/limit what kind of engineer you can become, once your interests are more honed in during the last years.</p>
<p>At my school I knew kids who came in wanting to be EEs, and wound up in a different area of engineering. This was possible, and no problem, at my college because the offerings were strong and comprehensive across the various engineering disciplines. </p>
<p>There are generally considered to be at least four core engineering practice areas : electrical, mechanical, chemical, and CIVIL.</p>
<p>This would all go towards addressing your initial question: how is Yale for engineering. </p>
<p>As for how Yale is in other fields outside of engineering, or how Yale is as a recruiting ground for non-engineering jobs, as may be offered in fields like investment banking,or advertising, or social work, or bartending: , all these aspects would be separate questions, with probably quite different answers.</p>
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As one potentially highly relevant measure, suggest go to school websites and count: # professors, and # courses actually being offered in the current semester, specifically in/by the engineering dept at Yale vs. other engineering schools/programs you might be thinking about. Breadth of available course offerings can literally dictate/limit what kind of engineer you can become, once your interests are more honed in during the last years.</p>
<p>At my school I knew kids who came in wanting to be EEs, and wound up in a different area of engineering. This was possible, and no problem, at my college because the offerings were strong and comprehensive across the various engineering disciplines.
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<p>Well, if this is going to be a metric you use, then I would also suggest examining just how free you are to switch majors and take different courses. It doesn't matter if your school has lots of available engineering majors, if you are not actually given the freedom to switch around them. A certain highly ranked engineering school that shall remain unnamed comes to mind that doesn't allow engineering students complete freedom to switch majors. That privilege is extended only if you have a certain GPA (a 3.0 at least, and often times a higher GPA in order to switch into certain engineering majors), and if you don't have that GPA, then you're basically stuck in whatever engineering major you happen to be in. Trust me, it's very easy to end up with less than a 3.0 if you're an engineering student, and thus discover that you can't switch around. If your school offers a broad range of engineering offerings, but you can't actually take advantage of that fact because you're stuck in an engineering major that you don't like and you can't get out it, then what does it matter? It's as if that choice doesn't even exist, because, for all effective purposes, it doesn't.</p>
<p>Why can't you name the school Sakky, that would be GREAT, USEFUL information</p>
<p>Vin2l, I think I'll keep it anonymous for now, otherwise people will accuse me of constantly picking on this one school (which I don't think I am doing). </p>
<p>But if you really want to know, you can just search through my old posts and you will see that I talk about one particular school quite a lot.</p>
<p>Sakky I assume you mean Berkeley. You're not bashing a school if you're providing factual information. Its actually really good information. </p>
<p>I do have concerns about the idea of having to specify a major when applying to a public school and then getting locked in, for better or worse. Is this true at the better engineering publics, UIUC, Mich, GeorgiaTech, Purdue, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland? </p>
<p>I also question the idea of choosing a school and then having to "get into" the major you want. If you don't get in, you're hosed!</p>
<p>I'm also concerned about registration issues and not being able to get the classes you want when you want them. Is that an issue at Berkeley or other publics?</p>
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I do have concerns about the idea of having to specify a major when applying to a public school and then getting locked in, for better or worse. Is this true at the better engineering publics, UIUC, Mich, GeorgiaTech, Purdue, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland?
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<p>Every school has different rules about this, and it is something that you need to check out carefully. Some do, some do not. </p>
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I also question the idea of choosing a school and then having to "get into" the major you want. If you don't get in, you're hosed!
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<p>Yes you are. That is what makes the situation sad. A lot of people go to a school hoping to get into a certain major, and only later, after completing all of the prereqs, finding out that they didn't get into that major. It's a risky bet. </p>
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I'm also concerned about registration issues and not being able to get the classes you want when you want them. Is that an issue at Berkeley or other publics?
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<p>Yes it is. What tends to kill you is the scheduling of the class labs. Labs are these consecutive blocks of time that you have to reserve on your schedule, and, given your other classes, you generally have only a certain set of eligible open times. If you can't get into a lab section that corresponds with one of those open times, then you can't take the class. </p>
<p>What really kills you is when one of those lab classes is a prereq to a bunch of other classes, especially in a chained format. For example, if A is a prereq for B, which is a prereq for C, which is a prereq for D, and you can't get into A when you need it, then that entire chain of classes gets delayed. That especially kills you when one of those classes is only taught once a year. For example, if B is taught only once a year, and you couldn't get into A at the proper time, then you have to wait an entire year for B to be offered again. That kills people.</p>