Good morning everyone,
I was accepted at the University of Chicago class of 2019. I intend to pursue a career related to engineering. However, as far as I know, there is no engineering majors there.
I want to do something related to energy. Can anyone suggest me what major to choose?
I do not want to anticipate things and wait for my other decisions (acceptances I hope), but I want to make things clear in case I do not get any other acceptance.
(There is a possiblity that if I enroll at UChicago, I will do engineering at graduate schools.)
I feel like the point of engineering undergrad is that you can get a job right out of school. How will you be prepared for engineering grad if you take something unrelated??
The Institute for Molecular Engineering already offers and undergraduate minor and will be offering a bachelor’s degree program starting academic year 2014-15.
Look at the “Themes” section of the main page for the IME to get an idea of the primary areas the Institute will be focusing on.
Beyond that, there are a number of scientific majors which certainly relate to engineering at UChicago but which do not offer an engineering degree per se.
If you want an engineering degree, then that’s the degree you should get. Why did you bother applying to a school without engineering if you wanted to major in engineering? If it’s about prestige, I doubt that a school without engineering would have a lot of prestige in the engineering market. Do you have any other options for colleges - ones with engineering?
@albert69 let’s suppose they are which one shall I choose? (I got likely letters so did not received my aid yet. But U penn at least meets full demonstrated need)
I don’t know, but finances allowing, I hardly think you can go wrong with UPenn or Duke with engineering. If those are viable options, I would say go to one of them if you want engineering.
Either one has good engineering programs. It is probably a question of what fits financially and the type of school you want to attend. Penn is an urban campus while Duke is less so.
Anyway I might end up changing my major to attend Uchicago or go to Duke or Upenn if they finance me or wait for some other acceptances to make a final decision. I am very confused :-/
@CanadianBrigade Well I am suffering a severe dilemna… and I am expecting Cornell, Columbia and Notre Dame too.
plus decisions from Stanford and Harvard. Do you see my problem :-/
You want to do engineering as it relates to energy. Look at schools with a dedicated undergraduate engineering division then. Duke and Penn, for one, both offer minors in energy engineering which you can pair with a x engineering major.
Really, you have no dilemma at all, at least none concerning the University of Chicago. If you want to be an engineer, then you want to go somewhere with a good engineering school. That includes Duke, Penn, and Cornell, certainly, and does not include the University of Chicago. Duke, Penn, and Cornell also have first-rate departments across myriad disciplines, so you will have plenty of choices if you decide to change majors (and, everywhere, it is fairly easy to shift out of an engineering program, but difficult to shift into one midway through college).
Chicago is a great university. Personally, I believe it offers a better undergraduate education in most fields than Duke, Penn, or Cornell (which are nothing to sneer at, by the way). But not engineering. If you want to be an engineer in any kind of traditional way, that means that you don’t want to go to the University of Chicago. It’s that easy.
If there are things you like about Chicago, you can find equivalent courses or programs at the other colleges.
As noted above, there’s no engineering school at Chicago, however there is a computer science department, which is often part of the engineering school at other universities . . . for that one particular field there is a program.
Folks, why is everyone completely ignoring the Molecular Engineering Institute? It will be offering a bachelor’s degree effective 2014-2015. It already offers a minor. Admittedly, UChicago will not have in the near future an engineering school offering the traditional classifications, but if you read what the MEI will be doing, there is strong overlap with chemical, biomedical, metallurgical, and mechanical programs. It actually sounds pretty exciting to me, and if I were starting out as a potential engineering student, I would be very interested.
To get some background on how and why UChicago has decided to pursue engineering in this fashion, please see 25:15 minutes into the YouTube clip below where former Provost Rosenbaum (now President at Caltech) talks about the process of building the MEI at UChicago.
Engineering is not like environmental studies, where you can cobble together a hodgepodge of kinda-sorta-related classes. The courses one takes are standardized, and ABET certification is critical in several of the most popular engineering fields.
The molecular engineering program is interesting, but it will not replace a traditional engineering program, nor is it intended to do so. I suspect it will be most appealing to those in the sciences or those who plan to get further education (MS/MEng/PhD) and go into research.
Or those looking to understand nanotech/desalination/quantum computing/etc.
I disagree that ABET accreditation is all that necessary in such a new field (esp. while it’s just getting out of the shadows of ChemE). I suspect that in just a few years, the ABET will create an accreditation covering Chicago’s (and Penn’s yet-to-expand-to-undergraduates) program.
