<p>My son, currently 11th grade, is not sure whether to apply for physics, MSE (materials science and engineering) or applied physics (part of the engineering school) at Cornell. Is the admissions hoop easier to get through in one or the other, or doesn't it matter?</p>
<p>Well, he’ll have to apply to either the College of Arts and Sciences or the College of Engineering. Generally, A&S accepts weaker stats so he might have a better shot, but if engineering is really what he wants to do, then that might be pointless. I recommend that he utilize the alternate-choice option that allows him to apply to two colleges within Cornell. He can list engineering as #1 and A&S as #2 and his application will be reviewed for his second choice if he gets rejected from engineering.</p>
<p>By the way, Cornell’s applied physics program is notoriously hard to graduate from so good luck to him!</p>
<p>Enrolling engineers have overall higher math SAT scores - that’s about it. A&S is more selective percentage wise. </p>
<p>Apply to the school with the major you like better - simple as that. Job opportunities is something else to think about - I’d think engineers would have better job prospects overall than physics majors, which is highly theoretical.</p>
<p>AEP (Applied Engineering and Physics) is arguably the most difficult major at Cornell. I’ve heard rumors and anecdotes, but from what I can tell those classes teach at the graduate level. </p>
<p>I think with Physics, your son would take a normal route: required courses through mechanics, heat, optics, etc. with additional electives. It’s a traditional hard-science major with a liberal arts twist, but I think AEP is the way to go if your son is a self-acclaimed nerd!</p>
<p>And yes, job prospects tend to be brighter with engineers because of the technical/applied skills. This one time, my stats professor showed the average salary after graduation of all 7 undergrad colleges at Cornell. Let’s just say CoE peaked about $10,000/year above other colleges.</p>
<p>Thanks, everyone. I had heard about alternate choice, but not with such a clear description.</p>
<p>I looked again at the physics degree program because I heard that A&S had more non-major requirements than engineering. For the life of me, I could not find anything on the physics website that talked about non-major requirements. I had to go to A&S for that. It says, five courses from at least four of the following:
–Cultural Analysis (CA-AS)
–Historical Analysis (HA-AS)
–Knowledge, Cognition, & Moral Reasoning (KCM-AS)
–Literature & the Arts (LA-AS)
–Social & Behavioral Analysis (SBA-AS)
In comparison, for engineering, I eventually found “liberal studies distribution,” meaning six courses from at least three of a list that looks quite similar to the above, plus foreign language, which A&S requires too – but separately.</p>
<p>Is there some fundamental difference that I’m not seeing?</p>
<p>Language is certainly a big one, but engineers can dodge some of the bigger lower level courses in arts (intro econ) and get away with it…</p>
<p>Yeah, AEP was something I was strongly considering as a major for these past two semesters, but I finally chose not to declare AEP because it didn’t seem to allow to much freedom in terms of workload. As far as difficulty goes, I have yet to take an AEP class, but I was helping out a friend with his 4220 class (Mathematical Physics), and all I’ll say is the class is non-trivial. </p>
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<p>Yupppp, if you do AEP you can definitely go into quantitative finance (quite a few do…) :)</p>