<p>Would you happen to be Chinese? A friend of mine from Hong Kong (who got the Governor General’s medal for being the top student in undergrad at McGill) ended up doing two degrees simultaneously, one in Engineering because of his parents, and a joint honours math-CS because that’s what he actually wanted to do. He went to Stanford for PhD and is now working as an academic in Switzerland… Anywho, I wouldn’t base my choice of school on the Chinese students there or the SAT cutoffs.</p>
<p>Prestige is overrated. McGill is a good “bang for your buck” but you need to be an independent worker. It’s very sink or swim. That said, I don’t know much about engineering in particular. I can say that McGill is not particularly known for its engineering program (it’s not bad, but it’s not the place for engineering in Canada, that would be Waterloo). But I wouldn’t worry about it, since all my friends and relatives who did engineering in much “lesser” schools than McGill (at least from a US point of view) had no problem getting jobs (one of my cousins turned down the chance to be VP at Research In Motion, back before they were a huge success, pre iPhone days; he has no regrets however, since his actual job has him traveling the world in business class all the time). </p>
<p>The math program at McGill is quite good, especially in pure math and statistics (Waterloo has a whole faculty of mathematics though, but its students aren’t better than McGill students in that field). The applied math contingent has had a harder time keeping profs, I’m not sure why. But my classmates had no problem getting into grad school in math, stats and CS (Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Oxford (including 2 Rhodes scholars), MIT, Berkeley, Columbia, NYU, a bunch of other places, I’ve listed them before), and at least those in stats had no problem finding a job after (those with PhDs in pure math, wherever they went to do their PhD, is another story).</p>
<p>Don’t know about Lafayette or Rice, but if I were you I would consider other parts of the college experience to make a decision (atmosphere, location, climate, off campus life, etc). What are you looking for in terms of these? Money-wise, I wouldn’t want to take too much debt, so for me, that’d be a major strike against Rice. But I had no debt through my university education (Quebec resident, parents with RESPs). And for grad school, you’re the main component of your success, not the school you went to (as long as it’s a decent school, and all three mentioned are at the very least decent).</p>