I don't know where to attend - engineering

I’m really stressing about where to go to college next fall and I need some advice. I’m going to major in aerospace engineering and I’ve been accepted at Wichita State (I’m in KS), Purdue, GA Tech, and Texas A&M. Money has narrowed it down to WSU and TAMU. WSU is full ride and TAMU I’d only pay housing. My goal is to work for NASA doing stuff with spacecraft/rockets. WSUs aerospace dean is on a co op board with NASA and my robotics menor knows several people from WSU that now work there. TAMU is a higher ranked program and is rather close to JSC. I haven’t applied for housing or visited there and I have to decide by May 1. TAMU offers a more prestigious program but it’s bigger and may be harder to get opportunities but I don’t know. WSU is smaller and not as well known. I’m worried that if I go to WSU it’ll be hard for me to work with spacecraft like I want to. So my question is how successful do you think I can be at WSU as compared to TAMU? How important is what college you go to in getting a job/recruited by good companies? Would I hurt potential job prospects if I go to WSU? I think I could stand out more at WSU and I’m in honors, but I know TAMU is higher ranked. Any insight is appreciated. Thanks.

Working for NASA is hard no matter where you go. It’s very competitive. You’ll have to have very good grades and good project experience. With that said, NASA applications can fall into a black hole. Even very qualified students never hear a peep when they apply through OSSI. I’d choose the program that has the best connections to NASA and then work hard enough to get a recommendation. I’d be surprised though if A&M doesn’t have equally impressive NASA connections. They have a very well regarded aerospace program. Lastly, were you directly admitted into either or do you have to compete for a slot in AE. @boneh3ad will be a good resource for your question.

Check on GPA requirements to renew scholarships and get into your desired major at each school.

It’s impossible to say how successful you could be at school A vs. school B because there are simply too many factors at play. What I will say is that TAMU has plenty of good connections with NASA, so that shouldn’t be a factor here.

If the price was the same, I’d probably pick TAMU. But Wichita State has a very strong aerospace engineering program, probably because Boeing had a plant in Wichita for a long time. When I worked for Boeing in Seattle, I’d visit the Wichita plant two or three times a year, and it seemed like half the people there had gone to Wichita State.

I feel like Wichita State is less focused on the astro side of aerospace. Do you know if this is true? I’m worried I would have a harder time making it in the astro business going there, though I’m leaning towards them because I’ve yet to visit TAMU. I’m hesitant to pass up a free education at WSU because my mentor knows like 7 people from ME/AE at NASA and a friend of my cousin knows two more. But I don’t know the odds of getting a co op. If I’m a top student at WSU, which I think is likely, does that make a difference or is TAMU still the better choice?

You’re at least thinking along the right lines. The good news is that with ABET, you are guaranteed to have to pass over a relatively high minimum bar in both the aero and astro side of things. However, the real question is the breadth of electives available, and I honestly don’t think I can help you there. I don’t know much about the astro side of things.

Another thing to keep in mind is that knowing a guy who knows more guys at NASA is not the same as opportunities with NASA and it would be impossible to compare soft evidence like that between schools. Formal relationships between NASA and the department’s and professors would be more valuable overall for undergraduates. The softer kind of relationships wouldn’t likely be as helpful unless you were a graduate student working for that specific professor.

It sounds like you’re more interested in astronautical engineering than aerospace engineering.

Have you actually checked into how many aerospace and astronautical engineers get hired by NASA or one of the private space agencies? When I worked in aerospace, the relative number of people with aerospace engineering degrees in the companies I worked for was rather small.

If the goal is simply to be involved with space exploration, you’d probably have a better chance if you had a computer science degree.

Sure there are fewer aerospace engineers employed by aerospace companies than other engineers, but there’s also a much smaller pool of aerospace engineers to choose from.

What is your real interest? If you want to design the actual hardware then I suspect you shouldn’t be laser focused on NASA. From what little I read, is seems that the vast majority of the design work is by companies under contract to NASA. There seems to be a lot of cutting edge design of space crafts being done outside of NASA.

If you haven’t visited A&M, please do so before committing. You should really try to get an in-person feel for the Corps of Cadets and other Aggie traditions. You’re not just getting an education, you’re getting a big slice of Texas culture and that needs to be something you want/like or you will be miserable, no matter how good your classes are.

This is sort of the ongoing debate of the age in terms of the American space program. NASA absolutely still develops cutting edge space hardware. The Space Launch System and the Orion capsule are two current programs, for example. The ongoing debate is whether NASA should be in the rocket business at all anymore or should farm it out to contractors with fewer political hurdles in the way of innovation. Ultimately, I think NASA will probably stop building rockets since companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin can do it much cheaper.

That said, NASA is in no danger of ending their job building things like the Mars rovers or other planetary landers. That’s still a very fun, challenging, cool set of projects to do. It all depends on what sort of projects interest a student.

While I generally agree that visiting a place as unique as Texas A&M would be smart before committing, I would also like to point out that a student is hardly required to join the Corps of Cadets (and in fact, I would personally recommend against it if it was my kid. I spent nearly 6 years there in graduate school, and while I was not deeply ingrained in or in love with Texas culture, I also was not miserable. Then again, the graduate experience and the undergraduate experience there are different.

The Corps is the most blatantly obvious example. Another example would be Rick Perry making the Aggie student government election national news.

Perhaps miserable would be too strong of a word, but just comparing these schools on academics without discussing campus culture would be a mistake.

The good news, though, is that the Student Government Association has absolutely no power and is basically just a bunch of people with some degree of symbolic power who think they are more important than they are. They are… kind of embarrassing, but pose no real threat given that the university administration is not bound by their essentially symbolic decisions and, in the interest of maintaining a functional university, generally ignores the controversial ones.

But I see your point on that one, and like I said before, I agree it is a unique place that warrants a visit before committing to attending.

This statement is just generally true regardless of which two schools are the topic of discussion if you ask me.

^^^ Yes, but nobody was mentioning this before I brought it up. To a certain extent, one big state university isn’t very different from another, but not here.