I posted this somewhere else and realized it probably should have gone here.
D wants to know what the intensity levels are like for mechanical engineering at UT, TAMU, and Rice. Specifically, she’s interested in the level of intensity of the:
We can speculate, but we’d like to hear from people with personal experience. Thanks so much!
News flash; all engineering curricula at most every ABET engineering school is hard. Very hard. Of course, the workload at a few select schools is tremendous.
Not worried about hard. D is very smart and hard-working. She’s also very practical and balanced so she doesn’t want “unnecessary” stress.
Looking for students with practical experience to share the “intensity” levels.
What does “intensity” mean?
We all know this will be hard and there will be stress. D wants to somehow figure out “how much” rigor / stress the ME’s are at UT, TAMU, and Rice, and determine the right intensity level for her.
Maybe another way to put it is to say the baseline is a university that provides the minimum ABET-accredited curriculum, with your corresponding caliber of students studying there. How far above the baseline are UT, TAMU, and Rice-- Maybe on a scale of 0 - 10 with 0 being the baseline and 10 being “really, totally unnecessary.” For examples of a score of 10:
Let’s try that.
Is she admitted to the major at UT? If so, then it looks like UT and Rice may be slightly less stressful than TAMU, since at TAMU, she needs to compete for GPA to get into the major.
What you’re describing is Caltech, drinking from a firehose. None of those schools approach that. None of them are known as grinds. None are known for high suicide rates. That doesn’t mean they won’t be hard. They will be. There’s just really no way anyone can give you any meaningful information about what you’re asking beyond that. It’s because stress and intensity are all personal and can have very little relationship to objective reality. I’d venture with the elimination of the grade pressure of TAMU, they’re all likely quite similar.
The other thing to consider is if the student has a high GPA requirement to renew a scholarship that is essential to afford the school, that can increase the stress level for that school.
I think you are overthinking this. For one, UT, TAMU, and Rice engineering draw from essentially the same pool of applicants and will tend to have students with largely similar educational and cultural backgrounds. The odds of the culture being dramatically different at any of them is pretty small. If anything, UT and TAMU will be nearly the same in terms of the factors of concern here, while Rice might be slightly different owing to all of the typical differences between small, private schools and large, state-flagship schools. Still, it’s not likely that those differences will translate much into “intensity” at the programs.
At any rate, probably the best approach to answering these things is to do a campus visit to each school and try to talk to several undergraduates about the prevailing culture and stress level and whatever else in the department. They are all going to have different overall cultures, but their curricula and the typical stress levels in each department are likely going to be nearly identical (and in the case of TAMU and UT, I can probably drop the word “likely” in that statement). Honestly, just visit them and find out where she feels most comfortable and choose that one.
We’ve visited each several times now. D sees major pros and cons to each, and is very adaptable so she could fit in probably anywhere. So she’s trying to get more data, even subjective data.
Thanks (once again) everyone for input.
Are there any current students that would be willing to add some data points?
@Commiserating, I suppose what I am basically trying to say here is what @eyemgh said with this quote. You aren’t going to have a 100% clear picture of some of these issues because to do so you would need nearly infinite time. If you really want to address this one, you will have to do one or more of a few things:
[ul]
[]get a more clear definition of “intensity”,
[]take another set of campus visits, this time making it a point to ask this question about each school specifically to current undergraduates in each department, and/or
[li]asking this question in a more targeted forum, like each of the school-specific subforums for these programs, as it is unlikely that anyone here has experience with all three programs personally at the undergraduate level.[/li][/ul]
Otherwise I think you are just going to have to make a decision. I’d also argue that this question doesn’t really have a general answer. Everybody derives stress (both constructive and destructive) from different sources, and none of these schools will be without any such sources. For some people, TAMU may be the most stressful because of the pre-engineering program. For others, Rice may be the most stressful because perhaps the comparatively high average test scores of incoming applicants might be more intimidating. Still others may be more stressed out at UT because it’s lively party atmosphere is a greater distraction to them. I just don’t honestly know how anyone can realistically answer this question.
Also, rigor and stress are not necessarily related. Choosing a less rigorous program because you think it will be less stressful is honestly just setting yourself up for disaster. Regarding the points that you cited as being a “10” on your scale:
I don’t personally know of any program that is actually like this. By reputation, Caltech may be the closest, but I don’t think it’s impossible to get it all done there, either, so it still wouldn’t be a 10 here. Most programs (or all of them, in a sense) have a curriculum that is designed to help students succeed, not crush them.
Out of all of the engineering programs with which I am familiar (which is certainly not a representative sample, but probably more than the average person), pretty much all of them have similar amounts of encouragement for students to work together as opposed to competing with one another. After all, engineering in the field is done in teams. Why should school be a competition. Engineering is not like pre-med.
This generally doesn’t happen. ABET requirements are stringent enough that there is a very limited amount of additional credits that can even be applied toward the extras that might overlap with more traditional graduate-level topics. Even then, none of the schools you’ve listed are among the small number of outliers to this generality that I know of.
My best advice is to stop worrying so much about minutiae like this, sit down with your pros and cons list, and just work through it together. You already sound like you have a larger data set than most other people do when making this decision.
Love the Sheldon Kopp reference. To make my personal position a bit clearer, I’ll borrow another one:
So you’re preaching to the choir when you say just make a decision. D needs to make one for herself based on what is important to her. Unfortunately, this process is a life-skill-building process, so it takes WAAAAY more time to go thru this process than it does for me to just pick for her. In fact, pushback on “define intensity” was part of the learning process because it made her think about what intensity really means to her and what about it is important to her.
So really, at this point, I’m collecting data that D wants from you wonderful CC people and feeding it back. She’s not just picking a college. She’s learning different ways to make an important decision. Oh and yes, we have talked through pros and cons. I’ll also remind her that she’ll never have all the data.
Again, thanks for all the comments. Also, I’ll take the suggestion and post this on the school-specific areas and see what we get from there.
I was in your shoes three years ago. Once I finally realized my continued involvement was more about me than him, I told him you have all the data that can be gathered. Go with your gut. About three days before the deadline he walked in and said “I know where I’m going.”
When we visited the first time I said “now that you’ve been here for a while do you think it was the perfect fit?” He replied “I like it a lot, but I’m sure I would have been fine at any of them.”
In retrospect, although I’m very happy with his choice and what he’s doing there, I think we, parents and children both, have been cultured to place FAR too much emphasis on finding the “right one.” I’m a firm believer that there are many of them and none of them are ever perfect (#6 There is no way of getting all you want 
)
Good luck. She’ll do well where ever she lands.
"we’d like to hear from people with personal experience. " - You might find grads that can give feedback on one school. But it won’t help you to “compare” since there are so many student-specific factors involved.
Yes, that is what we’re finding. Students can’t compare their program / environment with others. It’s an interesting exercise though. (D learning, learning, …)
Since they really can’t compare, maybe we should somehow incorporate their un-scientific data into the U.S. News college rankings! 
UT is a much more liberal environment than TAMU so keep that factor in mind to whether she would like a liberal or conservative environment
Personally, I would spin that in the opposite direction. TAMU is much more conservative that UT. Business Insider lists A&M as the most conservative college in the nation. Texas doesn’t crack their top 20 on the liberal list and wouldn’t likely crack the top 50 if it went that far. Saying UT is more liberal than A&M isn’t saying much. Most colleges are more liberal than TAMU. UT certainly isn’t a liberal bastion like Sarah Lawrence, Evergreen or Reed.
There are many more differences between the feel of UT and TAMU than the liberal/conservative difference. Both schools are so huge that both can find like minded and differing perspectives at both schools without working too hard at it. The feel of both schools is very different with one being urban and the other a college town. When dealing with that decision a few years ago alI I can say is that there was a very different vibe on each campus. We visited both several times. It was a tough decision but once my son shut out the pull from alumni from each school and input from mom and dad, my liberal kid picked TAMU. He still loves UT and visits friends there but feels like TAMU was the better choice for him. It is a good decision to have to make but very individual.
Has she made her decision yet?
I suspect all 3 schools have similar level of work required from engineering students.
People might think ALL the brighest kids end up at Rice but they would be totally wrong. Some of the best end up at UT because it is cheaper and if you get honors, you might get money and at A&M because with national merit you can get a full tuition ride. So the competition is what drives up the level of expectation from the professors which in turn makes some classes much harder than they need to be.