<p>Pros and Cons? How are the students, the teachers, the general atmosphere?
Is the neighborhood safe?</p>
Most of the criteria that you listed are distinct from the engineering program’s quality.
But to answer your question: Yes, Drexel’s Engineering Program as a whole is quite good.
The students themselves are diverse, and you’ll meet a few people that you like and dislike, like any other place. The teachers are good for the most part, but the Physics department at Drexel is notoriously incompetent: they aren’t capable of teaching first grade math, even if their lives depended on it.
Drexel’s atmosphere is alright. It’s a city campus, its not too bad and pretty modern, but the amenities are scarce. It has a few restaurants and a 7-11 near the dorms, but all of the attractions are on Penn’s campus. The attraction of Drexel’s campus is that it’s near Penn’s campus.
As for safety, University city is well policed, and the only sketchy part of it is the area around Powelton near the frathouses. There have been 2 or 3 incidents involving fights or strong arm robberies at night over the last 6 months or so, but you should be safe if you go with a group during those hours.
Sorry, I meant to make the question a bit more general but it didn’t turn out that way. Thank you for your response.
Drexel is an excellent school, especially in Engineering. We’ve got something called a Co-Op program where, in addition to going to school, also spend time working full time in industry related to our major. These Co-Ops are great ways to gain valuable experience, learn outside of the classroom, get your foot in the door (Many students find their first employment out of college through previous co-op or networking that they did on co-op), and see what it’s like to have a career in your field of study. It’s a bit of a complicated system and its unlike most other schools, so definietly look it up if you don’t know about it.
In addition to the Co-Op program, which is sorta Drexel’s big hallmark, the engineering program here is also the largest engineering program across all private universities in the U.S. We have top-ranked departments and are one of the most well-funded universities in terms of Undergraduate Research Opportunities - another great way to learn outside of the typical classroom experience.
Also, in regards to the what the previous user said about the physics’ department. It’s true that they are not the most amazing teachers - if you don’t want to put effort in, that is. Physics is not something that comes intuitvely to most people - If you expect to just go to lectures every week and learn it, you’ll have a bad time. If you actually do what you’re asked though - which means reading the book, going to lecture AND recitation, doing the homework problems, and studying by doing more than just practice tests - you can actually get a lot out of it.
Well, you can learn anything just by putting in an inordinate amount of work. However, the fact remains that some classes will be easier to perform in if the professors are competent. In the case of the Physics department, it is quite hard to do well in the class due to the poor teaching ability of the teachers, which often does more harm than good. My advice would be to skip the lectures and attend recitations twice : the TAs are superb for the most part, and they actually go through the effort of explaining problems and concepts clearly.
And Physics is not really difficult or intuitive, at least when it comes to the lower level classes. It’s only confusing if a unskilled or unprepared professor gives the student unhelpful or inaccurate material, which is unfortunately the case.