<p>You can check my stats out in the college admissions forum but its obvious to me that Stanford is going it be a big reach.
I want to major in Materials Science and Engineering so im looking for some other strong engineering universities to apply to.</p>
<p>For safeties I have Clemson and North Carolina State</p>
<p>Georgia Tech is almost a perfect match for me but i dont think i would enjoy myself at all there. I just recently started considering Northwestern and Cornell for something between an easy admission and Stanford. Basically id like to hear your thoughts on other highly regarded engineering schools to apply to. As a consideration i dont like cold weather but that wouldnt be enough to stop me from going somewhere.</p>
<p>UC- Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Maryland-CP (probably another safety)
Edit: A few more: University of Michigan, Harvey Mudd, University of Illinois</p>
<p>I think Cornell is harder than Stanford academically, and you will have to adjust to the weather. Fall and spring are beautiful in Ithaca. Winter can be beautiful too. The climate in Ithaca is much nicer and more exciting than whatever that place is in California with incessant sunshine. </p>
<p>Cornell is like boot camp for engineers. Work ethic is part of the curriculum. Engineering adminisrators pride themselves on it. Seriously.</p>
<p>I see UC Berkeley coming up in couple of my threads, given my stats (check my chances threads) and the fact im out of state make UC Berkeley almost as much as a reach of Stanford? or am i putting too much emphasis on it being hard to get into from out of state?</p>
<p>If your GPA and test scores are high, Berkeley OOS is definitely easier than Stanford. Berkeley is big on numbers and once you have those, you have fighting chance for it. Stanford, on the other hand, want you to have not only stats but also bunch of amazing ECs/essays.</p>
<p>Northwestern and UIUC! Along with MIT, they are the usual top-3 programs in material sciences.</p>
<p>The Univ. of Florida has a top-10 materials engineering program and the tuition, even for OOS, is quite attractive for a program of that quality.</p>
<p>Stanford is a reach for almost everyone, but if your stats are competitive, I think you can do a lot better than Clemson and NC State for safeties, like maybe Northwestern, which has a top materials science and engineering program. I would also suggest UIUC, Michigan, and Penn State for safeties and Berkeley, Cornell, and Penn as matches/slight reaches.</p>
<p>"I would also suggest UIUC, Michigan, and Penn State"</p>
<p>This is kinda unrelated to rest of thread but something that is probaly going to come up is would i rather go to Clemson on a full ride (also i already have meet the majority of Materials Science professors) or would i rather 15K-20K a year to go to one of the above schools.</p>
<p>Aside from being more prestigious, undergrad engineering at Stanford is not necessarily better than Berkeley, Michigan, Cornell or UIUC, both in terms of academics or job placement ... especially in a traditional field like Materials. So don't feel like you are stepping down if you don't get into Stanford.</p>
<p>I would suggest Cornell as well. It's a very very tough school but the programs are all very highly ranked. Old SAT range for Cornell Engineering is something like 1380-1550.</p>
<p>undergrad engineering programs are acredited by ABET so you're going to study the same things no matter where you go. There are differences in how in depth they go based on how good the students are, but within a broad tier there is no reason to try to choose undergrad engineering program based on rankings. Employers don't distinguish between them, nor should you. Go to the one that suits you best in terms of location, class size, personal attention, and so on. </p>
<p>Mike-
Yeah ive definately considered that. Luckily if i switched out of engineering it would be to chemistry or physics which would both be very good at the majority of engineering schools.</p>
<p>Sorry military isnt for me, Id considered it in the past because of the tremendous benefiets but definately not how i want to spend my college/life. I</p>
<p>I'm sorry...that's an oxymoron. Where I live about an hour and a half from Stanford, we get sunshine about 10 days out of the year...it's more like incessant fog, rain, and generally crappy weather.</p>
<p>GT seems logical on paper state wise but in general it seems that people just arent happy about going there, i still need to do more research but at this point thats my feeling about GT</p>