What do you think about both colleges? Which is better and why in your mind? Please do not say things like “it all depends on you.” I know and would like your opinion. I was already accepted to both and am having trouble making a decision.
More specifically, I am going into chemical engineering. Overall I liked the environment of Penn State better and have more friends going to Penn State but am interested in the coop program at Drexel and doing the same at Penn State would be way too hard.
I got into both of those schools, and chose Penn State. To be up front, Penn State has been my dream school since I was a child, so I may be biased. Some of the reasons I chose Penn State were:
the AMAZING network for jobs after college (especially in NYC)
football
i know people there
the name “Penn State” is nationally known
my mother went there
I want to minor in Smeal, which is highly ranked
I love the atmosphere of State College
From what I have heard, engineering at Penn State is amazing, as it is extremely hard to get into at University Park especially.
Talking about Drexel, I mean that’s also an amazing choice. It’s in Philly, which is such a great location. The coop program sounded great, and they make it really appealing to go there. I’m a communications major, so I don’t know too much about their engineering program.
I know this isn’t really what you want to hear, but it truly is up to you. Do you want a big college atmosphere, or small? Do you want huge sporting events, or small? Do you want to live in a big city, or in the heart of Pennsylvania? It truly is all up to you.
I posted this question in the forums for both schools since I expected bias. I really wanted to hear both sides. My true dream school was Georgia Tech and I was accepted, but the out-of-state tuition was way too high. In my mind, it had a great mixture of both schools with the coop, city, and great environment and it was higher rated than both of them for engineering. Now I am just trying to figure out which parts of which school, Penn State or Drexel, are more important to me. I was hoping some other opinions would help.
I have not heard very much about Penn State’s job network? Is it really better at getting students jobs than Drexel’s coop? Because one of the major points that Drexel stresses is that their coops almost always lead to job opportunities.
Well, D2’s boyfriend graduated last year from PSU as a mechanical engineer. He had at least four job offers before he graduated, two of which came from his internships. He’s working for a major petrochemical company. He had three roommates, all of whom were engineers - the chemE is also working for a major energy company; the computer engineer is working for one of the really really really big software companies and the third one is in the Peace Corps - because that’s what he wanted, not for lack of options (I don’t recall what his engineering major was). And all four of them had their jobs before graduation.
QuietType, does that mean that it would be very important that I get a couple of internships while in college then? And does Penn State help get these internships or would I need to find them on my own? Also, are we talking paid internships similar to the coops where I would do real work related to my major or are they unpaid mail delivering jobs?
Don’t know much about Drexel, so I won’t say it all depends on you.
DS top choices for CH E included Bucknell University, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, PSU and some others. Here are some basic Penn State websites for information.
DS did research last summer as rising junior and has an internship in industry this coming summer. Unfortunately, he could not do a Co-Op with his Alumnus Mentor’s company because he would lose some scholarship monies. That said, Mentor knows a whole network of PSU people where he will be interning this summer. That’s how the PSU network works.
This is a recap of what I wrote last fall regarding Career Fair. You can research Co-Op.
Drexel’s program is a very strongly encouraged coop program where they almost ensure that you get a coop job. The school schedule is based around a three-coop cycle and they give students A LOT of help finding jobs.
From what I understand of the Penn State coop (what I heard during my visit), it would be completely my responsibility to do everything. I would have to make sure I can still schedule all my classes and would most certainly fall behind a year. Penn State’s coop seems much harder to do and if I were to go there, I probably wouldn’t even attempt it. Drexel also takes five years to complete with a coop, but everyone does it so it is normal and I wouldn’t really fall behind the rest of my classmates.
Since you mentioned Penn State’s job fair, are most of the employers looking for summer internships or do they expect coops and jobs that would require me to take off a semester? And how easy is it to get a summer internship? I am assuming they are rather popular since you can still take classes during the fall and spring. Do many recruiters hire freshmen or is their a certain grade level they are usually looking for?
I don’t know anything about engineering per say, so I can’t comment on that part…but Penn State is the #1 school for recruiters. The fall career fair has a several year long waiting list for EMPLOYERS to get a spot. Penn State is also highly regarded in Engineering.
How does the cost compare? Drexel, last I looked, was far more expensive than Penn State. It’s also in a totally different environment. I don’t think you will have a problem getting a job with a PSU engineering degree. So it may come down to which environment you like better.
As an anecdotal aside, my friends son is graduating this year with a Mech E degree from PSU…started at Altoona and did the 2+2 and he already has several job offers…just waiting for him to make a decision. He has more interviews upcoming. The “Penn State Network” is just that. With 600,000 living alumni of Penn State - it is much easier to network with alumni than at a school like Drexel.
@unsure128 Regardless of what school you go to, internships and/or co-ops are very important in any field, but especially in engineering. From what I see of the engineering major friends of my two daughters - one at PSU, the other at Pitt, pretty much all of them are doing internships or coops. I suspect that it isn’t all that hard to find internships right now for engineering majors, regardless of what school you attend. D2’s boyfriend’s brother, who is a computer engineering major at Pitt has been working at a couple of coops so far in his three years. The sister of D1’s boyfriend, who is an electrical engineering major at a small school in PA also had multiple internships throughout her four years and also has a job waiting for her when she graduates this spring.
By the way, all of the internships I’ve mentioned have been paid and paid well. In fact, if you extrapolated the monthly intern pay of the PSU computer engineer to 12 months, you’d be talking in the six digits.
You really don’t need to worry about finding internships/coops as an engineering major, regardless of which school you decide. But even Drexel won’t hand them to you, you need to find out how/where/when you have opportunities - talk to your professors and advisors.
@jlhpsu Because of some merit scholarships, for me Drexel would actually be a lot cheaper. The cost is not really my concern with either as these two schools are my cheapest and best options right now. Before creating this thread though, I wasn’t even considering an internship. It does sound like a great idea. From the numbers on Penn State’s website, their internships seem to pay about $3/hr more than Drexel’s coop do anyways. Penn State’s just starting to sound better and better.
Is it normal for people to take internships every summer? I’m starting to consider it as a good alternative to the coop.
Any other non-job finding stuff I should consider? Like how is the learning environment? As a big school, how intimate are the classes? How rigorous and in depth are the classes? For instance, in sciences classes do they just tell you how things work or do they explain in detail with some derivations of why things work?
It’s generally after your second year that you’ll find internship opportunities in engineering. Not that nobody has done an internship after their freshman year, it’s more that you generally enter or declare your major at the end of your sophomore (or 2nd) year in almost all schools and majors.
I got into both schools, I chose Penn State and am now transferring (possibly to Drexel actually). Both my parents and my brother all went to Drexel and I have hated it my whole life. I always looked at it like it wasn’t worth the money and it was easier to get into so it didn’t have caliber. I have completely changed my view on it. The coop program is more impressive than I can even stress and when I was in your shoes I didn’t even realize it. UPenn’s hospital hires more Drexel grads than UPenn’s grads due to the coop program, just to give you a bit of how much that matters. Not only does Drexel have the co-op program, but the classes are geared towards your your major from the start of freshman year. All the classes I took at Penn State seemed to be strictly gen eds. I felt like I was just taking classes to check them off my list and not getting anything for my future. I had more crappy professors than good ones. But the good ones I had were really amazing. I like going out, but that’s the only thing to do at Penn State. There are no cities nearby and I didn’t realize how much I would miss that. I was surprised and disappointed to find that the majority of people I came across at Penn State were privileged and close minded. It’s a very cookie-cutter school. I thought I wanted to traditional campus, big school spirit and all that but it turns out I don’t. I’m transferring to a city school hoping to find people who are more cultured, open-minded, think about more than drinking. I absolutely loved the football it’s the experience of a lifetime and I did meet some of my best friends, but the school just isn’t for me. Classes are very very hard at Penn State, which is a good thing. My friends and I compared classes to people going to other schools like Temple, Bama, West Chester and found that we were having a much more challenging time than they were. Penn State has a beautiful campus and a pretty downtown with lots of bars and restaurants. It’s a great school, big alumni base, good career center, fun times out with your friends, great football, but in the end I wanted a group of people more geared towards their future than shot-gunning beers in a frathouse basement, and a school that would foster that for me better. Good luck on your search!
There is an on-campus job fair, which offer students opportunity to interact with tons of companies every year. Nearly all of my classmates had co-op experiences. I had 2 years of co-op experience.
PSU engineering is ranked #18 according to US News and rankings.
PSU was rated #1 by recruiters according to Forbes few years ago.
PSU just approved funding for new ChE building, which is to be completed by 2019.
I work for one of the largest companies in the US and there are tons of PSUers. Many top companies recruit heavily from PSU main campus (IBM, etc).
I graduated from PSU with ChE degree by the way… but also was accepted to both schools.