<p>Yeah… by your logic, people should not waste money going to top private school for education unless you have parents to back it up. Actually, you shouldn’t seek prestigeous degree at all since it won’t matter after 2-3 years in workforce. Why go to harvard and MIT when your status will be same as rest of the low rank college graduate? </p>
<p>Please go shoot yourself for making this outrageous claim. Better yet, go to ivy schools and yell out your degree here is worthless since it will be equal to the online degree program in 2-3 years in the workforce. </p>
<p>You won’t even get an interview at some companies if you don’t have degree from top schools in the nation. There’s reason why your school’s name is at the top of resume after your name.</p>
<p>What do you mean by top schools? Could you be more specific. </p>
<p>And what are the names of some of these companies that you wont get an interview with? That is, if you don’t go to the schools you’re referring to in my first question. </p>
<p>I’m not sure exactly what you are saying, but my opinion is if you can get a scholarship to MIT than take it.</p>
<p>ipopova: Yes, you will get both the NM Recognition and the Director’s Excellence. That is just the way A&M does it. They have multiple scholarships instead of one big one. You are correct…you will only get those if you designate A&M as your number one choice. They are guaranteed to all NM Finalists who declare A&M as #1. Yes, it does exceed the cost of attendance; however, A&M also figures in things like books, travel, personal expenses, etc. in their COA. Many NM kids will get more than the COA and will have some left at the end of the semester/year. To be eligible for NM sponsorship means that you are eligible to be sponsored by A&M. There are 3 ways for NM Finalists to become NM Scholars…1) sponsored by a corporation 2) sponsored by the National Merit Corp. (only 2500 of those) 3) sponsored by a university/college…A&M. You can only get one sponsorship. So, to be eligible for A&M sponsorship, you can’t have received #1 or #2. About half of all NM Finalists will not get any type of sponsorship and will not be named a “National Merit Scholar”. Hope this helps. :)</p>
<p>“You won’t even get an interview at some companies if you don’t have degree from top schools in the nation. There’s reason why your school’s name is at the top of resume after your name.”</p>
<p>See…Now WE KNOW you have not done enough research. For “fresh-grad” resumes, the format is to have your school name at the TOP of the resume because that all you have to go by BECAUSE you do not have enough work experience.</p>
<p>For experienced candidates, the resume format is: Name–>Summary of Qualifications–>Experience (multiple years)–>School Name/Degree/Certifications</p>
<p>As far as the “some companies who want top-school grads”…those companies are few compared to the overall number of available companies.</p>
<p>“I was unaware of that. Thank you. Are non-security clearance jobs also like this? Is that a comment for me? I don’t understand why you brought up Washington D.C. and schools around there.”</p>
<p>Ipopova,</p>
<p>I brought up the DC area universities because we have a poster who thinks you pretty much won’t get hired if not from a top school. I am a contractor supporting a certain “federal agency in Fort Meade, MD” and in addition to hiring the best Math/CS/Crypto students from the top schools, that same agency also employs contractors (who make more than the gov’t employees) from a wide range of schools. Of courses, the local area schools are represented heavily (U-Maryland, V-Virginia, John Hopkins, etc).</p>
<p>For one, I do not believe you are really allowed to say something like this. Two, no one is making outrageous claims. Some people, however, are trying to give you concrete arguments and all you can respond with is something along the lines of: are you crazy, of course you are wrong. For example, GLOBALTRAVELER and many others above clearly know a lot more than you do. Most of them ARE engineers or in pursuit already of an engineering degree and some if not most have even worked in the industry, but you, a high school student, claim that you know more about how to get a job then them. I think that’s really ironic… also I’m starting to sense a possible ■■■■■■■■ CCer… </p>
<p>And that’s it, I really don’t see any more reason to convince or fuel your ■■■■■■■■ otherwise.</p>
<p>this absolutely DOES happen all the time. if you get into a normal engineering career track, the people that get promoted are the hardest working, the best at office politics, and those who generate a superior work product. no one says “well we can’t promote that UNH person. after all , we have a MIT grad at the same level”. </p>
<p>a top-ranked prestigious school CAN matter, particularly for the opportunities i mentioned, but not in the normal engineering career track at large companies.</p>
<p>pay as much as you can absolutely afford to go to the best school you can. don’t sell your family home or take on more than $60k in debt (for undergrad) but make the deepest/biggest investment you can in your education. it will pay off in the end.</p>
<p>“I will have to back up Global Traveler in this. I have 8 years experience in the industry and I will tell you after 2-3 years out there in the field the employers only care that you have degree not where you got it from. It’s funny that people have no clue what they talking about. I had 2 Principal Engineers in one of my previous jobs, guess what one of them had a MS in Electrical Engineer from Georgia Tech and the other a MS in Information Technology from Strayer Univerity (Online) they both had the same jobs and same salary. Don’t cry for injustice when you graduate from MIT and your boss have an MBA from Phoenix Online, it happens all the time.”</p>
<p>depending upon the field and type of company that you work at this may or may not be true. for instance at some places that i am a <em>bit</em> familiar with you cannot get through the front door without a pretty rigorous technical interview. while they don’t necessarily care what school you came from, the quality of education does correlate (generally) to better prepared applicants. thus, employees at this company tend to be self-selecting from only a hand-full of institutions… and no, there are none from phoenix online or the sort. once you get in though, it doesn’t matter where you went to school. perhaps that is your bigger point?</p>
<p>Whether you like it or not, people who graduated from top engineer schools have more opportunities. They are more highly sought after graduation and easier get interview with top corporations and switch jobs. (Although switching jobs too many times can and will harm you in your career) There are few companies who picks exclusively for people with MIT graduate with lucrative salary offer. If the company’s HR or manager don’t even recognize the school on your resume, it goes right to the trash can and even if that individual gets interview with high gpa, he won’t be able to answer some of the hard technical interview questions laid out for him/her. Nvidia for example, they give out the technical questions right at the career fair just to pick the candidate with right skills and they don’t even bother visiting low ranking schools. There are few individuals who have proven themselves of their worth in the work place with no name college and made to the top however, that chance is slim to none since he/she won’t even get the big corporation job because of his/her low ranking school name and fail at technical interview questions. </p>
<p>Go to the best school you got accepted and try hardest to become the best at what you love. Ignore the advise from people who claims that going to low ranking school can/will still gives you success in life. challenge yourself by going to the best college you got accepted.</p>
<p>Salve! just letting you know, I ain’t no high schooler, I am georgia tech grad school student majoring computer science focusing on parallel programing</p>
<p>you chose Nvidia as an example…just for you</p>
<p>Jen-Hsun Huang – Co-Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer
-graduated from Oregan State Engineering Undergrad</p>
<p>Chris A. Malachowsky
Co-Founder, NVIDIA Fellow and Senior Vice President, Engineering and Operations
graduated from University of Florida Engineering undergrad</p>
<p>you picked the company…want to try again???</p>
<p>You are wrong. Jen-Hsun Huang have stanford master EE degree. If he did not assert himself in Oregon State University, He wouldn’t have gotten admission to Stanford graduate school. Because he went to Stanford for grad school, he was able to get top engineer education / people connection to venture into forming Nvidia. </p>
<p>Here are some more co-founders’ education background from computer powerhouse companies:
</p>
<p>I have no intention of rating school base on who founded what company with his/her educational background. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and founded his company and he’s most respected CEO and philanthropist. There are exception on someone’s success without top ranking unversity degree, however you have ** HIGHER CHANCE ** to achieve success in life with degree from top university. You can give additional example of a person without top university education and still achieved success in life, but that’s in the ballpark of 5% maybe even less out of all the successful people out there. </p>
<p>United States is one of the few countries who support higher education with extensive amount of loans for students. There are students in foreign country who have the intellectual mind and willingness to learn however, they can’t go to the university they want due to no support from their government. You all should feel lucky to born in the country where you can pursue the higher education with every resources supporting you from government.</p>
<p>CSmajor, I like how you ignore what the professional engineers are saying on here. Also, define success. Is it when someone is a multi-millionaire or when someone makes enough where they are comfortable and happy? It’s such a subjective term.</p>
<p>CS, you are right that a top school brand helps if you want to be a FOUNDER. however, that is vastly different than being an ENGINEER. </p>
<p>they are two radically different paths, and the founder route comes with significant risk obviously. but if you do want to go startup route, a top brand is great for connections and marketability to VCs/investors.</p>
<p>however, many people are just looking to join a large company at 50-60k and work their way up as a middle class lifestyle. if that is their ambition, a top school brand helps only minimally. as i said, if that is how you end up after a top-brand school, you wasted your money.</p>
<p>the founders I listed from the company you mentioned got their undergrad degrees from those ‘no name’ schools…you were speaking about undergraduate degrees before and now I’m calling you out on it. </p>
<p>It’s obvious now you want to change the topic to graduate degrees because you can’t back up your claims, retract your claims and than yes we can do that…</p>
<p>again the people you mentioned now</p>
<p>Robert Noyce- got his undergrad from Grinnel College in Iowa
Bosack- isn’t an engineer, did business undergrad
Sandra Lerner- isn’t an engineer either and got a Poly sci undergrad from Cal state
Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang- also went to Oregan State (good for OSU by the way) for undergrad</p>
<p>50% of the people you mentioned went to no name schools for undergrad and the other half went to their in-state public schools and they are all very successful…you are exaggerating the impact of undergrad prestige…</p>
<p>“There are exception on someone’s success without top ranking unversity degree, however you have HIGHER CHANCE to achieve success in life with degree from top university”</p>
<p>Which professional engineer are you refering to? GLOBALTRAVELER? I don’t know anything about GLOBALTRAVELER let alone the validity of his job that he is actually an engineer working in IT field. He can well be an employee at McDonald flipping burgers for all I care. Only thing that GLOBALTRAVELER talked about regard to this topic is how some few percentage of people manage to get a decent paying job with degree from ‘no name’ college. Whether I accept or deny some of the advice or opinions in CC is my decision and mine alone. If he’s so great of an engineer, I suggest he hold conference or seminar to show his extensive knowledge in university or open public. If he’s background and current job position is so admireable, I might just go and listen to what he has to say. Also Salve!, stop being GLOBALTRAVELER’s lacky. Although I suspect you are GLOBALTRAVELER’s second account. </p>
<p>You are right. Success is relative term but largely divided into: Fame and Money.
There’s old Chinese adage : ‘animal leaves fur and human leaves name’
Whether you can leave your name in the history and be remembered is entirely depend on what you do in life. If you define your success to be 60k-70k paying engineer doing dead end job, so be it. </p>
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</p>
<p>So What is your point? People should attend crap no name school for undergraduate if his/her goal is to get a master or PhD degree from prestigeous graduate school? Do you know how hard it is to get into Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley graduate school? There are numerous applicants from all over the world competing for these spots and whether you get into these graduate school is entirely up to what/how you did in undergraduate program.</p>