<p>haha just kidding about the title... kind of. i'm a bit worried i talked to a friend today who's a freshman engineering student at UT-Austin and he say the stereotypes are true about most engineering students being socially inept nerds. he says his entire first semester he didn't meet one girl. it sounds a bit stretched, but can anyone confirm/refute his claim or discuss to what extent it's true? thanks</p>
<p>Just don't go to UT
Go to Cornell.
Join a frat.
Voil</p>
<p>Being an engineer doesn't make you nerdy, nor does it force you to. Engineering fields in general just happen to have a large proportion of nerds. I have a couple good engineering friends who have lives (in frats, party every weekend, etc) but they work pretty hard during the week. I don't really know any other engineers because they don't come out too much. That or maybe they only hang out with each other because they're always studying together. All I know is it's definitely tough due to course rigor, time-consuming problem sets and labs (as opposed to "readings" in the humanities) and difficult curves (as opposed no curve). Also, I don't know about other schools, but Penn's engineers take 5 classes/semester, whereas people in CAS take 4.</p>
<p>I went to MIT, and I can tell you that the vast majority of the people I knew there (engineering or otherwise, and this was a school were everyone was hosed, not just engineers) had lives. Whether their hobbies and such were things that you would also enjoy doing depends on the person - there were students who went clubbing or party-hopping, students who played sports, students who maintained the sci-fi library and played LARPs, etc, students who did student government, etc. Some students did several of these.</p>
<p>And I don't know how it is in other schools' engineering programs, but at MIT, 38.4% of the undergrads in the School of Engineering are female.</p>
<p>In general, smart geeky kids, a category in which many science and engineering college students fall, can be a little undersocialized (I was) because they've been outcasts for most of childhood and thus have not had the chance to gain the social clue that others have. Given a friendly environment (as engineers might find with other scientists & engineers who have the same problem), this problem will generally lessen and disappear.</p>