Is Columbia SEAS for me?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Columbia University
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<p>Columbia's SEAS program gets bashed around due to the fact that it does not place very high in the rankings. I can't care less about them...</p>

<p>However, I was a little worried regarding SEAS very Liberal Arts intertwined education. I am a person who is looking to get into a technical job for a few years and then maybe pursue an MBA. Would Companies recognize the value of a SEAS education or would they rely heavily on rankings? How are job placements?</p>

<p>BTW I am planning to major in Electrical and Computer Engineering.</p>

2

<p>I have several family members who followed the same path, but they attended a highly regarded state school for their EE degrees & worked for several years before getting their MBAs. All are very succesfull, but they also all graduated in the top 5% of their undergraduate school. I don't know enough about SEAS to comment on that program, but all my relatives received multiple job offers while in college.</p>

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<p>^ Uh yeah, but does SEAS give me better chances in Job Placements? Or any chances at all? Is its engineering recognized enough?</p>

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<p>The SEAS is like Columbia College an undergraduate school of Columbia University. It's rank is the same rank of Columbia University itself which is 8th in the country</p>

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<p>^ Like I said, I cant care less about rankings.. I just wanted to know, if the job opportunities are abundant for technical students of SEAS. Would it be held in the same regard as other pure engineering schools like UIUC, Berkeley, etc in the industry?</p>

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<p>BUMP! Come on guys, help me out!</p>

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<p>SEAS is very well recognised, and I doubt you'll be discriminated against if compared against UIUC or Berkeley--places like MIT and Caltech, maybe. However, it'll also depend on the industry: what do you mean by 'technical'? What major are you considering?</p>

<p>That said, SEAS has some excellent engineering programs: like financial engineering.</p>

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<p>^ I have already stated that I wish to pursue a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. This is what I mean by a technical major. I am not considering a Liberal Arts school but one that has a dedicated engineering faculty.</p>

<p>Financial engineering is more into business and management than actual engineering, like Aerospace, Electrical, Mechanical etc.</p>

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<p>well, you clearly need to think harder about what it is you want to be.</p>

<p>If you want to work as an Electrical or Computer Engineer (which are two different professions requiring two different majors), then you're just looking for a technical education and employment with a technical firm.</p>

<p>If you want an MBA, because you want to work in finance, marketing, consulting, nonprofit, general management, want to be an entrepreneur, or any of a number of things that MBAs do, that's fine - then you're looking for a well-rounded education and a post-graduate job that gives you some exposure to business operations, transactions, or management.</p>

<p>If you want to be a manager at an engineering firm, you don't need an MBA to do that, you just need to be good at your job and have people skills. The two don't necessarily HAVE to intersect.</p>

<p>This doesn't mean that I insist that you "know what you want to be", only that it isn't as simple as you make it sound.</p>

<p>From the sound of it, you care more about engineering than you do about the hypothetical MBA down the road. Given that, I can tell you that SEAS has excellent recruiting from a wide variety of technical employers - CompSci and Chemical Engineering being particular specialties. There are numerous opportunities both in NYC and around the country for more hands-on engineering tasks; my roommate was a civil engineer and in SEAS and she now works at a structural engineering firm downtown. Many of the CompE people I know work for top tech employers like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc.</p>

<p>Many of the EE people I knew (okay, I only knew 3...) went to work for IBM or similar IT consultancies. They had done true engineering internships with engineering firms and decided that consulting was more fun, less boring, and afforded them the chance to travel or to work from home depending on their preferences.</p>

<p>If your heart is set on building a better pipelining flow for intel motherboards, then there are perhaps other schools which could do better than Columbia in terms of preparing you to get a job doing that - not that it'd be particularly hard even here. But what Columbia specializes in is well-rounded educations for well-rounded people, and well-rounded engineers tend to find themselves more interested by matters of management, finance, tech startups, and the like. You can't necessarily get that to the same degree at Drexel, even if Boeing recruits more strongly there.</p>

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<p>^ Sorry about confusing you with Electrical and Computer Engineering. Most colleges are referred to as School of Electrical and Computer Engineering [ECE], therefore I decided to generalize it, I am bent towards computer hardware and architecture. </p>

<p>You are right, I care more about engineering but I might want to consider an MBA for a career change should I find my field becoming less appealing. </p>

<p>I just wanted to know if a Columbia SEAS degree is well regarded in the industry, because I don't want to graduate and be left jobless just because the degree is not widely recognized or has too much focus on Liberal Arts, more than norm. </p>

<p>I want to focus on engineering but I want a well rounded education. At the same time, I don't want to be messing around with useless courses. How is the core by the way?</p>

<p>Thanks for your detailed answer Denzera!</p>

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<p>"How is the core by the way?"</p>

<p>The core is terrific, and many engineers I know really enjoyed it. The nice thing about the core is that SEAS students only need to do a subset of the core classes, not all of them--so you'll get a taste of the liberal arts but it won't detract from the techincal stuff. You can choose which core classes you take, so if you think they're useless, that's kind of your own fault :)</p>