Hello everyone,
To begin, my younger brother is currently a senior in high school and was recently accepted with a full ride to Rowan Engineering for their biomedical engineering program. He was also accepted at Rutgers NB for the same program. From what I have read about the engineering field, the ranking doesn’t matter as much when it comes to recruiting for jobs? Would love to learn from you all to see if this is in fact true. And also my brother I don’t believe would fit in with the huge crowd at rutgers. Would love to see which school you all would choose if it came down to it.
Thanks
A full ride for tuition at Rowan, and what money is Rutgers offering?
Rowan has risen rapidly in the ranks of Engineering schools, their facilities are good and getting better. The honors program offers some serious perks if you can get into it. For the money, I’d give Rowan a very serious look.
Agree with NJRoadie. I’d add, based on my empirical knowledge, that the odds on getting a diploma in 4 years at Rowan are greater than they would be at Rutgers NB. An extra semester or two there are common.
If your brother is a hands-on learner, Rowan would probably be a better fit because of their engineering clinics. From the first semester the students do company sponsored research projects, so when he graduates he will have 8 projects on his resume while at Rutgers you typically only get the senior capstone project.
When we visited Rowan though in the fall of 2015 we were told that the school is still working on its accreditation for Biomedical Engineering but they are confident they would get it because of their success in the other engineering disciplines.
Rutgers has huge job fairs but from what we heard Rowan career placement is very proactive (almost daily emails to students to check out this and that opportunity) and there are much fewer students competing for the jobs.
Our concern with Rutgers was the lecture halls for hundreds of students. They seem very impersonal even though we were assured that the recitations (small group discussions) to unpack the lectures were very helpful. D got into the Engineering Honors Academy. Our understanding is that when you are in this program you skip the large lecture halls and have small classes from the start. Also the students in this program have first pick of research opportunities. But then you would still have to compete with the all the other honors kids for the projects. At Rowan they talked about the “dog and pony” show the professors stage every year, “selling” their research projects to students and practically begging for volunteers :-).
D will end up not attending either school but after our second visit to Rutgers, we would probably pick Rowan over Rutgers for Mechanical Engineering. The lack of accreditation for biomed would be a serious concern for us though if that were D’s intended major.
I’m not sure about the connection between rankings and employment but there’s this piece from NYTimes that says that ultimately prestige hardly matters for fields like Engineering - worth a read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/education/edlife/are-elite-colleges-worth-the-cost-of-tuition.html