<p>Blah2009, the mean/median ACT score for the Michigan class of 2015 was 30. That’s for the entire university, including programs that do not weigh standardized test scores as heavily, such as Art, Kinesiology, Music and Nursing. The CoE generally has a slightly higher mean, likely 31. That is not significantly lower than the 32 ACT mean for admitted Engineering students. As you aptly point out, many of those admitted with higher ACT scores end up choosing schools like Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford, but there is not that much of a drop. </p>
<p>Secondly, suggesting that Larry Page’s success is entirely thanks to Stanford is about as accurate as suggesting that it is entirely thanks to Michigan. Firstly, if it weren’t for receiving an excellent undergraduate education at Michigan, Larry Page would probably not have been admitted to Stanford’s graduate program. Secondly, Larry Page owes much of his success to himself and to his business partner. The two years he spent studying at Stanford did not magically transform Larry Page from nothing to the co-owner of Google.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I have no beef in this Larry Page Michigan:Stanford Google love affair. Larry Page did not attend MSU. Nonetheless, I do know that both of his parents enjoy living in East Lansing, and take pride in teaching at MSU. :)</p>
<p>P.S. I am, however, reminded of another Larry! Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of “Wikipedia,” but he went to tOSU. Nupedia - the predecessor of Wikipedia was developed when he was a graduate student at Ohio State. I guess one could certainly argue, as Alex alluded above in the case of Larry Page who attended Michigan before heading off to Stanford, that Reed College did contribute to Larry’s admission to tOSU’s graduate school.</p>
<p>Personally, i’d say no. But i think Alexandre put it best when he said “There is no right or wrong answer, only personal preference.”</p>
<p>imo, a better program would allow you better research opportunities with better professors in the field. Perhaps that might not translate to better job prospects, but it might train you better as an engineer, which could certainly be valuable later professionally.</p>
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<p>Perhaps this is just an anecdotal point (one which you might similarly be able to provide) but of the 20 classes i took at UCLA, only one of them was taught by TAs. And they didn’t actually teach the whole class, but rather, one of the two lectures, under the guidance of the main professor. (it was an introductory Latin class which all of them had to have mastered) I don’t know what your perception about public universities is, but it’s pretty rare, at least at UCLA, for classes to be taught by TAs. (except in summer) I expect the same thing holds at Michigan.</p>
<p>“I have no beef in this Larry Page Michigan:Stanford Google love affair. Larry Page did not attend MSU. Nonetheless, I do know that both of his parents enjoy living in East Lansing, and take pride in teaching at MSU.”</p>
<p>They also were graduates of The University of Michigan. Notice which school their son decided to attend?</p>
<p>OP, many people have faced the same choice you do. I was one of them, back in the day. My gut told me to go with Michigan, and I’ve never regretted it. I was admitted to the Honors Program at Michigan (engineering isn’t my thing) as well as the Honors College at MSU, so that perhaps made my decision easier. (By the way, with your stats, my guess is you’d be a shoo-in for the Honors Program at Michigan if you wanted to go that route). Most people I know who faced that choice went with Michigan, but I do know a few who went the other way and none of them regretted it, either. So at the end of the day, I think you just need to do what your gut tells you. It’s a nice choice to have; consider yourself lucky.</p>
<p>I have to say, though, that looking at the engineering curriculum at MSU, it’s not clear what the Honors College actually gets you. I see you can waive out of some general university requirements, which looks to be 6 classes, and you might be able to take some more advanced math and physics classes. But aren’t all your engineering classes still going to be just regular engineering classes, i.e., not Honors classes, not Honors sections, not with other Honors students? If that’s the case, I’d have to wonder about that choice. Seems to me there might be an advantage to doing your major at the school where your classmates are stronger, and in engineering that would definitely be Michigan.</p>
Alexandre, there’s a pretty large difference between an ACT score of 30 and an ACT score of 32, especially when it is spread out over an entire university as large as Michigan. Michigan shares very little overlap with the 4 universities you mentioned; almost no one applied to HYPSM and Michigan unless they reside in the Wolverine State. Penn, Cornell, and Northwestern are the three elite private schools that Michigan shares a majority of its cross admits with. It also competes with Illinois, Boston College, USC, NYU, Tulane, and UMiami among other good schools.</p>
<p>Actually, it essentially did. Google was born after Brin and Page were doing a joint research project on the Stanford Digitial Library Project. The founder of Sun Microsystems actually gave these two entrepreneurs their initial funding and then later the VCs KPCB & Sequoia Capital gave a much larger chunk of money to help Google open shop.</p>
<p>Only at Stanford can you be in such close access to angel investors and VCs who are willing to fund and take a risk on promising new ventures like Google.</p>
<p>Although Michigan is essentially as good as Stanford in Engineering, it doesn’t enjoy the same benefit of location. If Brin and Page did their PhD studies in Ann Arbor or Urbana Champaign, its hard to imagine that Google would exist today.</p>
<p>Goldenboy is just dead wrong: TAs at Princeton do exactly what TAs do at Michigan, they lead discussion sections of big lecture classes. Except at Princeton they call it “proctoring” and they pretend it’s not teaching, but the function, and the role of the TA, is just exactly the same. And there are a lot of big lecture classes at Princeton; if you do the math, you’ll see that on average students at Princeton spend more time in large (50+) classes than in small (<20) classes.</p>
<p>I’m replying off the CC app, so I can’t quote and reply…</p>
<p>MSU’s Honors Program would let me “turn any class into an honors class.” In some cases I’d be in the same class as my honors peers but not in all of them.</p>
<p>I haven’t looked much into UMich’s undergrad research and internship opportunities though. Does anyone know much about UMich in that respect?</p>
<p>“Alexandre, there’s a pretty large difference between an ACT score of 30 and an ACT score of 32, especially when it is spread out over an entire university as large as Michigan.”</p>
<p>Not really, 2 points on the ACT is negligible.The mean ACT at Brown and Cornell is 31 while the mean ACT are Notre Dame and Vanderbilt is 33. I doubt anybody would argue that Notre Dame’s student body is significantly more talented than Brown’s. Not that it matters since the mean ACT in the CoE is actually 31. As I explained above, the mean ACT in the CoE is higher than the mean ACT overall. If the mean at Michigan is 30, the mean at the CoE is around 31.</p>
<p>“Michigan shares very little overlap with the 4 universities you mentioned; almost no one applied to HYPSM and Michigan unless they reside in the Wolverine State.”</p>
<p>I have no way of proving or disproving your statement. </p>
<p>“Penn, Cornell, and Northwestern are the three elite private schools that Michigan shares a majority of its cross admits with.”</p>
<p>That is correct. I would add Cal among the elite universities that Michigan shares many cross-admits.</p>
<p>“It also competes with Illinois, Boston College, USC, NYU, Tulane, and UMiami among other good schools.”</p>
<p>Not so much with BC, Miami or Tulane, but definitely with Notre Dame, UCLA, Wisconsin-Madison and WUSTL.</p>
<p>Finally, my point was not that Michigan contributed to the development of Google, but rather, that Michigan contributed to th development of Larry Page. It was at Michigan that he developped his technical abilities.</p>
<p>bclintonk is correct. Only 3% of Michigan classes are taught by TAs. Those are almost all lower level language and mathematics classes. The remaining TAs are primarily used as discussion leaders. The same is true at any major research university. The only way a university like Columbia or Harvard or Penn, with its 10,000+ graduate students, can put them to work is by making them research assistants or teacher assistants. For some reason, private universities are ashamed of admitting that graduate students work as TAs.</p>
<p>But doesn’t “turning any class into an honors class” just mean that you do some extra work to get the extra “Honors” credit? In other words, you’re still in the same class right alongside the same people, most of whom aren’t honors students?</p>
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<p>They invest a lot in undergrad research opportunities. Here’s one place to start:</p>
I don’t know if I would say that Vanderbilt’s student body is significantly more talented than Brown’s but they do have stronger students based on test scores.</p>
<p>Percentage of Students Scoring Higher than 700 on the CR Section of the SAT
Brown: 62%
Vanderbilt: 69.8%</p>
<p>Percentage of Students Scoring Higher than 700 on the M Section of the SAT
Brown: 67%
Vanderbilt: 76.9%</p>
<p>ACT Composite of 30+
Brown: 72%
Vanderbilt: 88.6%</p>
<p>However, Vanderbilt seems to only care about test scores in evaluating admissions while Brown seems more holistic. For instance, not all of Vanderbilt’s high scorers on the SAT/ACT did quite as well in the classroom. 22.3% had a GPA between 3.50 and 3.74 in high school while 14.2% had a GPA between 3.25 and 3.49. Grades don’t seem to be as important to Vanderbilt adcoms.</p>
<p>At any rate, all of these schools have average students that are still much stronger than Michigan Engineers academically.</p>
At Michigan, you can do undergraduate research as a first semester freshman, all you have to do is sign up for it (UROP). If you wish (and is capable), you can do research in all four years as an undergraduate. I’ve known students who have done that.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is evidence that Brown is more “holistic.” It’s at best evidence that as between grades and test scores, Brown may value grades more highly than Vandy, and Vandy may value test scores more highly than Brown. That’s not “holistic” on either side.</p>
<p>Except we don’t even know that, because we don’t know that they’re reporting either grades or test scores the same way. Brown might be reporting weighted GPAs while Vandy is reporting unweighted. Or, one or both of them might be reporting “recalculated” grades according to their own formula. Vandy shows higher ACT scores, 30-34 middle 50% compared to 29-33 for Brown; but Vandy may be reporting superscored ACTs and Brown not. We just don’t know. These so-called “objective” statistics are not necessarily comparable, and not at all transparent.</p>
<p>We do know that Brown reports 93% of its freshmen who reportied a class rank were in the top 10% of their HS class, compared to 85% at Vandy. But since in both cases the percentage reporting a class rank is under 40%, that doesn’t necessarily tell us much either.</p>
<p>Bottom line, such fine parsing based on so-called “objective” stats is a fool’s errand, because we don’t know the figures are comparable.</p>
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<p>This is a wild an totally unsubstantiated inferential leap, based on nothing but some blind hatred for Michigan that you seem to carry, goldenboy. Brown’s average ACT score is 31. As Alexandre has explained, that’s probably the average ACT score for Michigan engineering. Brown reports 93% of its freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class. Michigan reports 92% of its freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class, but that’s for the entire university; it’s well known that admissions standards for Michigan engineering are higher than for the university as a whole, so a reasonable inference would be that the percentage of freshmen engineering students at Michigan who were in the top 10% of their HS class is as high or higher than at Brown. Again, we don’t know if these figures are entirely comparable, but the most reasonable inference would be that Michigan engineering students are roughly at the same level in terms of academic stats are Brown students. You certainly can’t conclude from these stats that Brown students are stronger. Much less that they’re “much stronger,” which is just risible.</p>
<p>For Vandy it’s a little more complicated. For some reason, Vandy seems incapable of calculating an average ACT. At least they don’t report one. Makes me suspect it’s a 31 rather than a 32, the midway point between their reported 25th and 75th percentile; otherwise, why wouldn’t they just say? But in any event, the difference between a 31 and a 32 is negligible, at best. On the other hand, only 85% of Vandy freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class, compared to 92% for Michigan as a whole and almost certainly higher for Michigan engineering. So I’d conclude that, on balance, Michigan engineering student are at least roughly as strong if not stronger than Vandy students. </p>
<p>Pretty much only blind prejudice could tell you otherwise.</p>
<p>The Undergraduate Research Opportunity (UROP) and Michigan Research Community (MRC) are non-selective research programs designed to provide all entering Freshmen at Michigan with research experience, usually on one-on-one basis with established faculty. Most enrolling freshmen who request research opportunities get placed.</p>
<p>If honors means that much to you, and you are certain that you intend on majoring in Computer Science, you can always apply to the school of LSA. They offer a BS in CS, and as part of the school of LSA, you will be considered for the honors program. This said, there are no guarantees at Michigan. Only 40%-50% of admitted students with ACT scores over 32 are admitted into the honors program. There is no risk to you going that route mind you, as switching from LSA to the CoE is very easy. Also, should you wish to double major, (say CS and Economics or CS and Mechanical Engineering), it is certainly possible, even if those two majors should be CS Honors in the school of LSA and Mechanical Engineering in the CoE, although that combination may take an extra semester to complete.</p>
<p>“This is a wild an totally unsubstantiated inferential leap, based on nothing but some blind hatred for Michigan that you seem to carry, goldenboy.”</p>
Nupedia - the predecessor of Wikipedia was developed when he was a graduate student at Ohio State. I guess one could certainly argue, as Alex alluded above in the case of Larry Page who attended Michigan before heading off to Stanford, that Reed College did contribute to Larry’s admission to tOSU’s graduate school.</p>