Water rises to its own level. If you don’t believe Swat is a place for you to be a future engineer, then you don’t belong there. I guess it depends on how you want to use what you learn.
I would suggest that the non-engineering opportunities were equally as important as the engineering ones. When people run the list of engineering schools, not many have the level of non-STEM offerings that Swat does. Those classes at other schools also don’t have the same type of kid participating in small groups of 10-12 for almost all courses. My D’s friends from Swat are absolutely amazing kids. I miss Thanksgivings with her friends (we live nearby and hosted several each year).
My daughter didn’t know what she wanted to be at 17 when applying to schools, but she knew what she didn’t want for a career. Electrical Engineer…no thank you. Chemical…nope. Environmental, Ceramic, etc., etc…not for her. She wanted to study engineering because she wanted the challenge and she wanted to know how things work. She was in it for education…not a job. The job just sort of worked itself out in the end, and she’s doing something she likes with an interesting company where she learns a lot each week and gets paid fairly well for it.
It may not be the best place for a lot of people to study Engineering, but I will never question that it was the best (and possibly only) place for her.
@SchoolNews - there were a few things she didn’t like. Every single class was a challenge. Generally, that was a good thing, but there were times during the first 2 years where we all wondered if it was worth it. She was working all the time. It didn’t help that she played a sport and sang in the choir.
She also would have liked a semester abroad, but the engineering options were limited. She didn’t take a class at Penn. There are a lot of kids who take classes at Haverford/Bryn Mawr, but the Penn option has a lot more strings than the others and can be a big “time suck” for one class. There are vans that run frequently to the Tri-Co versus having to hop a train to 30th St and then walk over to Penn. Another small point, but kids can’t eat at Penn using their Swat meal plan when they’re on campus like they can in the Tri-Co. BM has GREAT food.
Looking back, she’s also a tiny bit upset she didn’t get to go there with the new Engineering building. The old one wasn’t great…but that’s no longer an issue.
For all of those limitations, the other positive was her personal relationship with the professors. She knew them all by name, and they knew her (and all of her classmates). I mentioned in the last post…she had a very close relationship with one professor, who helped her both inside and outside of Engineering with some heavy calc issues “just to brush up” with her MIT Ph.D. She was amazing.