I’m not sure. He didn’t want that type of overall undergraduate experience anyway, so we never dug deeper.
I’m very confident that for the right student, Caltech would be an amazing experience.
The main point I was trying to make is that there are a lot of institutions that produce very good engineers. We’ve sort of been hoodwinked into thinking that it has to be T-5, T-10, T-whatever, to have a successful career. When you start to look at very high functioning teams of engineers within companies, you quickly find that the undergraduate schools represented (graduate schools, especially for PhD are a different story) are all over the map, literally, including Europe.
The differences in the major institutions, not say Cal State Channel Islands, but Iowa State to MIT are at the margins.
Again, no disparagement at all of anyone of the schools mentioned. They are just examples of peoples opinions within industry and academia, and they aren’t consistent. That’s a good thing for anyone who feels that if they don’t get into school X their life will be ruined.
I would say that the major difference is in the peer group. While you can have brilliant people anywhere, you will have a larger percentage of them in the highest rank schools. I once calculated that if you filled a minivan with random MIT students, there is roughly a 50% chance that at least one of them won an international competition.
Because of this concentration, these colleges can offer classes that others colleges cannot (Harvard’s Math 55 is one example), or push harder in the classes that everyone has to take. For some students, that is the reason they chose the college in the first place.
I would hate to go off topic from OP but we are very interested in his experience. Is there anyway I can ask you more questions regarding his this? Maybe a private message? Thanks.
In any engineering curriculum, the vocational component – i.e., the practice of engineering, especially in ABET accredited traditional branches, is likely to be 90% similar. The non-vocational components – i.e., the garnishes, could be widely different. So if you poll a group of practicing engineers, you will get the responses you seem to be getting. This doesn’t surprise me at all.
A lot of the time people look to go to a T5 or a T10 not because you have a stronger engineering curriculum, but because the place offers you the optionality to pivot into non engineering careers late into your undergrad with little additional preparation. Sometimes pivot even post undergrad. Arguably better paying paths.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that this translates to producing better engineers. There are multiple MIT engineers on the forum and they repeat over and over that they work among very talented colleagues that went to school at all sorts of random places.
We’re getting a little off topic. I posted that to reassure the OP that their student will be fine, and to respond to a poster whose spouse wasn’t particularly fond of hiring GT new grads.
At the end of the day, high horsepower, curious students, with strong work ethic will succeed in any environment.
If GA Tech’s overall admission rate was 17%, the admission rate for CompSci was likely far lower. I would not be surprised if it was in the single digits.
numerator, meet denominator. The admission rate tells you nothing meaningful about the quality or rigor of the CS department and faculty.
I am not knocking GT at all (big fan). But pointing out that critical thinking seems to go by the wayside when it comes to lauding or criticizing a particular university.
Do you somehow have the impression that MIT only takes math people? They actually do like other sciences too. And despite the snark, some of these are fascinating people, with the ability to very rapidly understand topics outside their specialty, including literature, philosophy, and politics.
But apparently, that’s not your thing. That’s ok too.
So what you are saying is that the minivan odds aren’t even 50% for a math contest winners? So disappointing. And here I thought MIT was supposed to be a quality institution.
We do agree on one thing. Idolizing academic contest winners is most certainly not my thing. Neither is measuring the quality of education by how many such winners one is likely to find in a minivan. I did find an image, though, that might be the contest winners at MIT . . .
Generally, Nobel Prizes are awarded to those who “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Equating academic contest winners with Nobel prize winners is the type of false idolization to which I refer.
To use a single example that cannot be verified to prove GT is sub-par?
As a career electrical/computer engineer, I can tell you that GT graduates have served in many many engineering fields, the industrial standard committees. Perhaps only Purdue can catch up with GT’s dominance in industrial fields. MIT and Stanford produce good professors. GT and Purdue produce many folds more established engineers in industries.
spot on!
