Is College important?

<p>I was wondering if where you went to college for engineering was important in terms of getting employment. Does where you go to school matter a lot?</p>

<p>Also, I was taking a look at the top undergraduate rankings for engineering from U.S. News, and I saw that most of the schools (other than MIT, stanford, berkley) were schools i've never heard of before I took interest in engineering. For example, I didn't know of UIUC, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech.. Purdue, Penn State, etc.. judging by the rankings though, they must be very good schools for engineering. I was wondering if the employers, if they take college into consideration, really care about the ranking of the school, or if they care about the name. </p>

<p>For example, harvard is number 26, but Georgia tech is number 5. Will they prefer Georgia Tech or Harvard?</p>

<p>You never heard of Michigan, Georgia Tech and Purdue???</p>

<p>You must’ve been under a rock all these years.</p>

<p>before I’ve started researching engineering schools, i have not.
most of the people I know have never heard of UIUC, purdue …
Only a handful have heard of Umich and Georgia.</p>

<p>Where do you live?</p>

<p>xD, maybe i have.
NYC.</p>

<p>The idea of what schools people have heard ofis an interesting one.</p>

<p>xoushua, I don’t know anything about your background, but if you never heard of these schools, you are living in a cocoon. You really need to look out beyond your little island.</p>

<p>Now, to answer your question, of course, employers look at and know what schools produce good engineers. So they know that Georgia Tech has a better engineering programs than Harvard. All things being equal, they would prefer GA Tech.</p>

<p>Prestige is more important for undergrad then grad school. Grad school, it’s still helpful, but more than anything else it’s about merit.</p>

<p>NYC explains it all. A lot of New Yorkers aren’t aware that there is another 2000 miles worth of United States to the east of the Appalachians. I once had a New Yorker start to reference Family Guy, stop, and then ask if they broadcast family guy where I came from (St. Louis). It really is laughable. To be fair, Los Angelinos aren’t any better.</p>

<p>heh, given that I lived in los angeles and moved here in my freshman year… I still haven’t heard of these colleges in L.A. either. Maybe I’ve been living in a cocoon, haha.</p>

<p>So, even if harvard is so much widely known than Georgia Tech, Tech will be preferred in terms of enginnering? (undergrad AND grad?)</p>

<p>For engineering, absolutely.</p>

<p>The answer is yes.</p>

<p>And I’ve heard that about New Yorkers, how they think everything west of the Hudson River is jungle and Mt Rushmore until you get to Los Angeles</p>

<p>In my opinion there are significant caveats to the idea that Georgia Tech is better than Harvard for engineering.</p>

<p>1) Harvard will have a better alumni network, and the connections made there will be more valuable, simply because you’ll be around so many high-caliber students.
2) You will be at no disadvantage in the eyes of engineering firms coming from Harvard (I just read this sentence over again and it’s ridiculous that I even have to mention it)
3) You will have more career flexibility. From Harvard you can move into consulting, finance, business, etc… not just engineering jobs. It will be a lot harder coming from Georgia Tech.
4) Harvard students can take MIT classes. (only if the equivalent is not offered at Harvard, so this means you can take elective courses at MIT)</p>

<p>Personally, I think Harvard will give you “the whole package.” In terms of your education and future.</p>

<p>It also depends on which field of engineering you’re interested in. Harvard is better in some and worse in others.</p>

<p>It also depends on cost. If Georgia Tech is a lot cheaper, you may consider choosing it.</p>

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<p>In fairness, I can think of plenty of people who had either never heard of MIT at all, or if they had heard of it, didn’t know which state it was located in (in other words, didn’t know what the ‘M’ stands for). I can also think of plenty of people who had never heard of Stanford or Berkeley.</p>

<p>I hate to agree with sakky (honestly!), but while I had heard of many of these universities when I was a high school student, I had certainly not heard of them all and I could not have guessed at their relative strengths with any real accuracy. Cut the OP some slack.</p>

<p>But…</p>

<p>

Yes and no - the Harvard alumni network has little presence in the engineering world outside the business side, and relatively little presence there since engineering managers generally do not want to take a new engineer based on the marketing manager’s advice. However, there are more Harvard alums in upper management, so sometimes this can be a wash. But it would not help at my company (a Fortune 100 company), for example.</p>

<p>

No, you will be at a disadvantage. While Harvard has a great reputation overall, engineers coming from Harvard suffer from a couple of stigmas - first, that the program is not strong in engineering (it isn’t), second, that people who generally want to be engineers usually choose engineering schools and not Ivy Leagues, so the expectation is always that these guys are bucking for management or biding time until they can get the MBA. </p>

<p>

This one is absolutely true. No argument.</p>

<p>

Yes, and that helps a bit. A little bit. The problem is that most places can hire MIT grads if that is what they want. Or Stanford grads, or CalTech grads, or grads of a dozen different schools. Or they send their current engineers to take MIT classes. You get the idea - if the diploma says Harvard then you are mostly going to get credited as a Harvard engineering grad, and it really isn’t that hard to find someone better.</p>

<p>That having been said, I have yet to meet a Harvard engineer in any company I work for, nor heard of any recruiting being done at Harvard for engineers.</p>

<p>I agree that you don’t find many Harvard alumni in engineering. But I think that the fact the many Harvard alumni are in management positions is going to be a boon to any engineer looking to move up (and who doesn’t want to move up?).</p>

<p>I don’t agree with the whole concept of Harvard necessarily having a stigma.
At Google, for example, Harvard undergrads are very well represented (after Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT), according to y father, who works there. Then again, Harvard CS is better than most of its other engineering disciplines.</p>

<p>I would agree, though, that if you are dead set on engineering, you are probably much better off at Stanford, MIT, or Princeton (and if you can get into Harvard you can get into these), which gives you all of the same advantages of Harvard + strong overall engineering programs and reputation.</p>

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<p>I can think of some people who got into Harvard who didn’t get into those 3 peer schools you mentioned. </p>

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<p>A related advantage is that Harvard is extraordinarily well-connected - indeed, almost ridiculously well-connected - within the venture capital community. I suspect that there are more graduates from (especially Harvard MBA’s) than there are graduates of any other school, including Stanford, within the venture capital community even within Silicon Valley itself, let alone within the VC communities of other locales. If you’re a Harvard engineer with a serious tech startup business plan in a white-hot tech economy as this one, I would say that it’s virtually assured that you’ll be able to call at least one meeting with a VC, simply by virtue of the Harvard network and brand. {No guarantee that you’ll receive funding of course, but at least you’ll be granted the meeting.} I doubt that the engineer from Georgia Tech can say the same. After all, VC is, frankly, one of the most elitist and networking-driven industries in the world. </p>

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<p>Harvard is ranked somewhere in the 20’s-30’s in engineering. I don’t know about anybody else, but that seems pretty darn decent to me, when you consider that there are hundreds of engineering programs in the country. </p>

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<p>And I’ve always wondered why that’s such a terrible thing. Why is it taboo to be ambitious and want to be promoted to management quickly? Do engineering firms not want ambitious people? {If so, then that’s, sadly, an excellent reason for an ambitious person to choose not to work as an engineer.} </p>

<p>In particular, I wonder why, say, the consulting and banking firms don’t seem to feel any antipathy to ambitious new college graduates who have no intention of remaining as analysts but rather want to be promoted (and they henceforth will happily scoop up boatloads of Harvard graduates, even the humanities graduates). Consulting and banking firms don’t seem to mind that almost all of their new hires will leave the company after 2-3 years to either work at another firm (e.g. one of the consulting/banking clients), or for an MBA program, never to return. Indeed, the consulting/banking career ladder is structured around such transitory employment amongst new graduates. Why can’t or won’t engineering firms adopt the same attitude?</p>

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<p>Come on, now, was it really so painful to agree with me?</p>

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True, but it’s engineering ranking is much much lower than its overall ranking, and for many people it is possible to get a higher quality AND cheaper education elsewhere - and yes, Harvard does have crazy good financial aid, but that will not save everyone from the full bite of both the tuition and the cost of living in Cambridge.</p>

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This is useful only to that narrow subset of engineers who are interested in starting their own business AND actually have the inventiveness and techical acumen to create a worthwhile product. For most engineers, the value of the Harvard connection is much less.</p>

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Engineering firms want ambitious people, but not all ambitions are focused on management. Many ambitious engineers want to create something great, discover something new, or take something flawed and make it perfect - companies DESPERATELY want those people.</p>

<p>The problem with the management-focused types is that they do not generally have great track records as engineers. Many of them are so focused on advancing their careers that they constantly flit around looking for the next step up - in engineering, it is much harder to achieve real success that way, although it is quite possible to conceal failure in this manner. Many others rush so hard for management that they fail to learn the technical and interpersonal skills that they need to actually DO those management jobs. Many, perhaps MOST, are so focused on their own superiority and time table that they will abandon their current company in a heartbeat to take that next stepping stone somewhere else - this has been discussed at length in my company, the number of mediocre engineers who bail after a few years because they were not being promoted for their inner brilliance and managerial potential. Particular attention was called to the money lost in recruiting and training these individuals who often leave before actually generating a net profit for the company, and how we should simply try to avoid hiring them in the first place.</p>

<p>Engineers, in my experience, tend to prefer people who drift into management based on their skill development rather than any imagined timetable, and often not until they are actually asked or actively encouraged. I like functional managers who get there by being that skilled engineer who finds time and ways to mentor and train younger engineers. I like program managers who start off by the guy with the best understanding of the technology and the customer’s needs who helps to keep everything moving. I like technical managers who start off with little components and expand their scope as they master each previous level, until finally they are designing things like satellites and aircraft carriers.</p>

<p>I DON’T like guys who say “I want to be a manager by thirty” because that is a guy focused on a time table, not on being a great engineer for the next 8 years. Please note that this may be a peculiarity of engineering, because I believe many management role favor audacity and ambition over all else, so this may just be a case where indeed this particular type of ambition is just better served elsewhere. Sales, finance, marketing, consulting, anywhere BS is flung freely and in great volume will tend to favor someone who pops out with a BS and declares that they are ready to manage within a few years… nor now!</p>

<p>As a bit of an anecdote, I was in a training program at my very large employer, oriented towards “ambitious” people who had an interest in leadership and management. As part of this program we gained a lot of access to managers and executives in the company. Late one night at an overnight training session several of us were clustered around a VERY respected engineering manager when a topic similar to this came up. He told us that one of his great regrets was advancing one particularly management-ambitious engineer into a management role too early - lacking the technical chops and the leadership skills, the kid not only bungled the program but also burned his reputation in the company and beyond, as both an engineer AND a manager. He said it set the kid back years, and made him very wary of those rushing to management.</p>

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Yes. Yes it was.</p>