<p>Pls do not comment on the rigor of a Hopkins education Pierre. Especially considering you have not even graduate from high school. (lol) Not many ppl understand how much we go through at JHU. I am not even in a position to even comment on how rigorous a Purdue engineering education is myself. I know through my close friends that Hopkins engineers go through some of the most difficult regiment of courses in the nation. You have no idea what engineers go through at Hopkins… Pls do not comment. :)</p>
<p>I prefer these 2009 undergraduate rankings from USNWR:</p>
<p>Engineering Specialty Rankings: Electrical/Electronic/Communications
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5.0
2 Stanford University 4.9
University of California–Berkeley 4.9
4 University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign 4.7
5 California Institute of Technology 4.6
6 Georgia Institute of Technology 4.5
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor 4.5
8 Carnegie Mellon University 4.3
9 Cornell University 4.2
10 Princeton University 4.1
Purdue University–West Lafayette 4.1</p>
<p>
USC is #1, counting both grad and undergrad, followed by Purdue.</p>
<p>
I assume you checked the number of research opportunities at Purdue before you made that sweeping claim.</p>
<p>
False. Any college that requires a senior thesis (e.g. Reed or Princeton) has a 100% participation rate in undergraduate research.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Hate to beat a dead horse, and this might be an ranking with just undergraduates, but this listing says USC is #1: [Leading</a> Institutions](<a href=“http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=131540]Leading”>http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=131540) </p>
<p>
In any case, my contribution to this thread is that JHU overall has the much better name. Should you decide that you do not like engineering, and wish to switch into something else, JHU will put you in a better position and you will have a better breadth of options.</p>
<p>With the logic displayed by future purdue/current students in this thread, I think you’ll turn out well there…<em>sarcasm</em>.</p>
<p>Just because a school is larger means there are more research opportunities? And Purdue is definitely more rigorous despite classmates at Hopkins being much more academically accomplished? Good luck with that line of reasoning with employers. I am at Stanford for grad school and help out with admissions. I can tell you point blank, A diploma from Purdue is not viewed as more rigorous than one from a highly selective private with renowned professors. Quite the contrary.</p>
<p>Blah2009, I am not a future or current Purdue student, do you work with engineers? engineering firms respect a Purdue degree (my whole family is scattered around the US and are all engineers and they all look favorably on Purdue)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would have to verify my claim for the number of research opportunities at Purdue. I have not done that. Instead, I will retract my previous assertion.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ahh… IBClass09, You are absolutly correct my friend. I will like to amend my previous comment by saying: “80 percent of the university’s undergraduates engage in some form of independent research during their four years.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So a larger school with more professors equals more opportunities for research? =-P Wow. I never knew that. </p>
<p>Does the fact that Hopkins is the only university in the US to exceed the $1 billion dollar threshold for annual research and development budget matter a tiny bit?? I personally believe the amount spent annually matters a whole lot more than size and number of faculty and professors.</p>
<p>Next you might tell me Purdue’s student body might be more accomplished because Purdue has a larger student population than Hopkins. lol</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No one on this forum is doubting Purdue is a highly regarded institution among industry heads in the engineering field. Many of us are questioning whether you are even remotely qualified to determine the inter-institutional rigor level at two very different universities. I honestly am not sure how a high school student can know the rigor or the amount of research opportunities available between these two schools. I certainly can’t. I can only provide the facts but I can tell you right now, neither or us are qualified or in a remotely reasonable position to judge the institutional rigor or number of opportunities available at these two schools.</p>
<p>It is too easy as an onlooker to make assumptions and judge programs of which we do not understand. Yes, Purdue is a fine institution for engineering I agree. A school with larger size and more professors does not mean it has more opportunities. I highly doubt Purdue engineering is more rigorous than Hopkins engineering because I know some of most top students who are engineers at Hopkins turn down Stanford, MIT, UPenn among other fine institutions and were salutatorians of their class who are being epically owned in classes at JHU engineering. These are some of the smartest students I know. The courses they go through are amazingly difficult… it is ridiculous.</p>
<p>I believe that, somewhat sadly, a school’s selectivity will lower the credibility and the experience of the best departments at that particular school. The people you hang around and even your fellow classmates at Purdue just won’t stack up to the people you will meet at JHU. The professors might be at a similar level, but take into account the people who “got accepted for just applying” being in the same classroom as you for all those non-engineering classes your taking (Which will most likely constitute the majority of your coursework).</p>
<p>Also the differences between Purdue and JHU engineering may seem large ranking-wise, but I believe that the real difference is negligible.</p>
<p>Purdue has a larger, higher ranked and more famous Engineering program than JHU. This said, at the undergraduate level, the difference in departmental quality will be insignificant. JHU is one of the top 20 undergraduate Engineering programs in the nation afterall. Overall, JHU is a better university than Purdue. </p>
<p>As far as research goes, Purdue has more research activity in the Engineering field, particularly in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. However, Purdue has over 5,000 undergraduate students majoring in Engineering, so there will be competition for those opportunities. Johns Hopkins also has a pretty substantial Engineering research portfolio and undergrads are as likely to land constructive research experience at JHU as they are at any top ranked Engineering program.</p>
<p>YouTube, if your family has the funds to afford JHU, I would recommend you go there. Purdue is very good, but JHU is elite and I believe your overall experience there would be slightly better. If finances are a concern and money is tight, then I would recommend Purdue. $60,000 over 4 years is certainly nothing to sneeze at!</p>
<p>Pierre, Blah2009 (if I remember correctly?) is a Johns Hopkins undergraduate alumnus who is currently doing graduate studies at Stanford university. I think he would know a thing or two more than your average high school student (as you are). I trust him when he says that a prestigious name is likely to accord with a perception of higher rigor and better perceptions overall.</p>
<p>Also, the fact that JHU is only about 4 or so spots away in Engineering Ranking from Purdue means that the “Purdue is a better engineering school” crap is simply that: crap. For graduate studies, this may be true…but this is simply not a big difference in undergrad. Purdue might offer a more diverse variation in choices, but JHU excels very well in the courses and majors that they do offer. Also, for incoming students who might not be 100% sure on Engineering, JHU is an obvious choice as it is well-rounded and excellent in just about any field you can think of.</p>
<p>And IBClass06, it’s funny that you mention Princeton and Reed forcing a 100% undergraduate research thing because I think you and I have different opinions on research. Research for those senior theses, from what I know, usually and often accords with personal experience and some library books and/or online database searching. THAT is very different from what I and Phead cite as the research reported by Hopkins where students are actually testing out hypotheses in laboratories, conducting biostatistics, epidemiology studies, etc. This type of research is significantly different and requires thinking and working to many different mental capacities than looking up things in the library and online, even if it IS a lot of information to provide as supporting documentation. </p>
<p>Anyways, it is still true that Hopkins has the highest level of NON-MANDATED research in the country and has the funding and the resources to back that statement up. It’s very rare to see 400+ research positions open in the summer time for a student body of 4500+, of whom, maybe 1/10 will actually even stay in school for the summer (if even that much). These are legitimate research positions: ones where professors work side-by-side with students on a wide variety of topics and trust students to take necessary data, make crucial inferences, and control all controllable variables, etc.</p>
<p>With that said, Purdue is not exactly cheap. $35,000 is still a sizeable investment.
With money being important, weigh all these factors into consideration.
If money were equal, I would say that Johns Hopkins is a pretty clear and solid choice.
If money is an issue, weigh how much grad school, jobs post-undergrad, etc are important to you and what exactly it is in engineering you want to do.</p>
<p>Right now, it sounds like you are leaning towards Hopkins. If you are, and money is NOT an issue, then go to Hopkins.</p>
<p>
Nonsense. I’d love to introduce you to one of my biology major friends, who wrote her thesis about several new fungal genes she discovered…work that was published in Nature and won her the Goldwater and Marshall scholarships.</p>
<p>Of course, that’s just one example. Princeton’s database has quite a few more. Why not look through before making ludicrous comments?
<a href=“http://libweb5.princeton.edu/theses/index.htm[/url]”>http://libweb5.princeton.edu/theses/index.htm</a></p>
<p>(That said, this is getting entirely off track. I meant to say earlier that I too support Hopkins for the OP.)</p>
<p>^^ Yeah. Of course for bio majors, etc, they will be doing research. But for a lot of other majors and a large portion of the student body, research consists of sitting and sifting through the library.
Michelle Obama’s Princeton Senior Thesis didn’t exactly require lab work and wasn’t exactly award-winning/famous back THEN was it? lol (not so sure now…) I’m sure her topic is not exactly out of the norm in terms of its connection to the individual and the style of research necessitated.</p>
<p>No need to mention winning Goldwater and Marshall Scholarships. They are very prestigious awards indeed, but I know of people from JHU that have also gotten these same and other awards for their own work, whether it was setting up clinics in Africa over the summer, developing nanotechnologies, etc.</p>
<p>There will be extremely intelligent and accomplished students from both of these schools. The differences are negligible.</p>
<p>Hope2getrice, thanks for showing that Blah actually is biased because his alma mater is JHU…</p>
<p>anyways, I think Purdue’s engineering program is just as rigorous as Johns Hopkins. The reason that it’s name isn’t as big as JHU is because outside of business and engineering, the liberal arts programs at Purdue are a total joke (that’s why there’s IU), JHU has a great music school, international studies and writing program. Overall, JHU has many stronger programs than Purdue. However, when it comes to engineering, Purdue’s engineering program is just as hard, i not harder than JHU. I agree with one point you said, if the OP is not sure if he wants to go into engineering and wants to major in something other than engineering, pharmacy, nursing, business, hotel management, agriculture or education, JHU might be the better choice.</p>
<p>“But for a lot of other majors and a large portion of the student body, research consists of sitting and sifting through the library.”</p>
<p>That is the nature of PhD research in most non-lab-science fields. We sat through the psych theses presentations yesterday at an LAC; they all involved original research experiments, many adjunct to the profs’ continuing research.</p>
<p>Hope, where did you experience what you describe?</p>
<p>Wow. Thanks for all the replies, guys. Err…This hasn’t made it easy for me to decide (lol!), but I definitely got to know aLOT more about the respective univs.
Purdue is brilliant for Engineering, but JHU is a better (and more well-known!) univ. otherwise.</p>
<p>Now, the choice is mine (DUH!); whether I want to goto a school which has a more reputed Engineering program (Purdue!) or the school which has a better name (JHU!).</p>
<p>Phew :P</p>
<p>I’m sorry pierre, but Hotel Management? Agriculture?</p>
<p>Um…sorry little High School darling, but this is the Johns Hopkins University…not Cornell…???</p>
<p>edit: ^^ ignore that part. I skimmed the message and misread. oops :D</p>
<p>And while the curriculum might be as rigorous, there will be a substantially higher curve at Purdue simply because the caliber of students there will be lower than the caliber at JHU, where you will have a sizeable amount of valedictorians, salutatorians, top 10%, etc competing for a limited number of A’s.</p>
<p>At Purdue, this is not the case, hence…less stress due to sizeable curve, and hence, less rigor :)</p>
<p>edit:</p>
<p>Vossron: The researching at JHU done by humanities students includes such specific experiences as getting a research grant of $3000 by the school to spend a summer working on writing a novel in Spain, myriads of internship experiences at the medical school, international studies school, etc, and tons of other types of research. It would be impossible to list them all, but one of my friends was notified earlier this year that she will be receiving $5000 in funding to start a humanities based research-experience in Italy for next semester.
Different from going to the library and looking up stuff.</p>
<p>Although I’m still for JHU in this situation, Pierre was pointing to the Agriculture and Hotel Admin programs at Purdue which are top notch and not JHU’s which I don’t think even exist.</p>
<p>Hope2getrice, I agree that because Purdue students are not as good as students at JHU. However, for the OP (who wants to later transfer to a school like MIT), Purdue might be better because the curriculum is rigorous but the grading will be easy because of the lower talent level among the students, thus resulting in a higher GPA for a potential transfer student.</p>