<p>You should definitely try contacting CMU’s financial aid people and telling them about the offer from Case. I was in a similar situation except with RPI, and CMU was willing to match RPI’s offer. CMU doesn’t have the money most other top schools have to hand out to every student; they only want to make really good offers to students they know want to attend CMU as their first choice.</p>
<p>I also did a Materials Science undergrad at CMU, so if you have any questions about that particular program, feel free to ask me. Also, keep in mind that if your son does go for a graduate degree in MSE, as long as he pursues a PhD it will be fully funded and he shouldn’t need to ever pay a dime of his own money. Finally, I really don’t think weeder classes for materials are at the graduate level. All of my friends that graduated in my class and went to grad school and I have agreed that our grad classes have been, at worst, on par with what we had in undergrad, and for a significant number of us, easier (we all wound up at “Top 10” schools in our field).</p>
<p>RacinReaver, are most of the engineering PhD’s funded, or just Materials Science? S1 is talking about graduate school after he gets his undergrad in engineering (as a freshman still undecided in what) and your comment jumped out at me. Would be great if it was true for other engineering majors.</p>
<p>All engineering and science PhDs are funded as long as you’re at a top 50 school or so. When I was deciding where to go for grad school I saw offers ranging from $23k to $30k a year based upon cost of living in different areas. Some fields also tend to pay a little more (I think biology tends to be high since the NIH has bottomless pockets.).</p>
<p>There are some limited funded positions for MS students, but they’re a lot more difficult to come by. My girlfriend took a different route and instead got a job and is having her employer pay for her MS while she works full time (and makes a boatload more money than I am).</p>
<p>If you want to find out more, drop by the Engineering and Graduate School sections of CC. There’s been a lot of talk about that stuff recently since grad school acceptances came out last month (fellowships are coming out around now, too).</p>
<p>KJCPHmom re funding for science PHDs…when you get to applying to grad programs, look at it this way: If you can’t get a funded PhD you should get a job.</p>
<p>I don’t know about materials science in particular, but CWRU and CMU have a ton of similarities. I can’t believe that the experience would be dramatically different/better at either. (Though I do like Pittsburgh way more than Cleveland.) When I saw the list of schools, I thought the cheap option was going to be Purdue.</p>
<p>RacinReaver, I appreciate the info. Did you feel the Materials Science program at CMU was what you expected? Were there lots of opportunites for internships, research and/or co-ops? CWU seemed to offer lots of opportunities to undergrads. I’m not sure CMU mentioned this as much so I’m not sure about them.
Here’s my son’s dream job. He wants to build cool “stuff” for exotic sports cars and work at Lamborghini. Ha! I’m sure next month he’ll have a different dream but can CMU offer him any co-op experience in the automotive industry?</p>
<p>The MSE program at CMU was fantastic. I’m still friendly with a number of the professors there (bumped into a handful at a recent conference and had some good conversation), felt my classmates were all really interested in the material, and thought the teaching quality was superb as well. I think it stems from the fact that the department is relatively small, and they hold departmental parties twice a year. At those you’ll get to meet professors, their families, and have non-class related discussions with them. I think it really motivates professors to teach well since they know the students as people and not just as numbers on a page. I know when I got my grad school acceptances I would only tell one professor (the one I was working for) that I got in somewhere, and by the end of the day I’d be getting congratulations from everyone I passed in the hall!</p>
<p>Most of us didn’t have any problems getting internships over the summer. Thinking back I remember people working for steel companies, Johnson & Johnson, Bose, Ford, Los Alamos National Labs, a Naval Research Lab, and a number of universities around the country over the summer (just to name a few). I only knew two people that did co-ops (one was with GE, I believe) and both of them enjoyed it. About half of my class wound up going to grad school, so most of us spent our time working in national labs or universities over the summer since that’s preferred for grad school.</p>