Swimmer Athlete/Engineering Schools in Northeast

Swimming can afford more flexibility in practice time than sports where it’s essential that you practice with the team.

Is MIT of interest? Tufts? Both have plenty of engineering majors on their teams.

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Sports and engineering can be a good fit and plenty of schools offer that combo. OP is asking for suggestions for schools in the north east that have both.

Dartmouth
UMass -Amherst
Tufts
U of Rhode Island (women only; men’s team is club)

Etc. You have to look them up to see if the school offers both.

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When I was at UT-Austin, the football team’s kicker, who was excellent, was in my chapter of the civil engineering honor society. Another award-winning football player was in my EE class. I sat behind him and wow, I’ve never seen a neck that big. :sweat_smile:

When I was a kid, one of my dad’s engineering students was a basketball player who later played pro ball overseas.

So I wouldn’t discourage an athlete from pursuing engineering. It’s doable with a lot of hard work and resolve.

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I think I was going more along the line of - and someone brought it up - to work with the school to see if it’s feasible there.

btw - Dartmouth was mentioned but per the webpage, it’s typically longer than a four year degree for engineering. This is their accredited engineering degree.

The BE degree generally takes 1 to 3 terms of additional study, depending on the courses taken during the first 4 years. (Advanced standing on entry to Dartmouth may shorten the time required.) Most add a fifth year to earn the BE (financial aid is available), but students may also plan ahead to finish a combined AB+BE in four years.

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I don’t disagree.

The point that some have made though is that it’s up to the coach what majors their players can have…that’s why recruits have to talk with the coach before committing/attending. If the coach doesn’t want engineering majors on their team, that’s typically copacetic with the school. I know D3 coaches who say there will be no lab science majors on my team, to take another example.

As coffeeat posted above, some coaches often won’t allow nursing majors on their team, same for education majors too, IME

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I know swimmers in Engineering programs at Stevens and Trinity (D3) and NJIT (D1).

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WPI (D3)

Definitely a school to visit as they just have a much different collaborative feel to them then many other schools. They emphasize group work and experiential learning

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This conversation is somewhat pointless without knowing the who competitive the swimmer is. From an athletic standpoint, discussing Michigan and WPI in the same post is a bit absurd.

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My D’s roommate at Illinois Tech iit.edu was a swimmer and graduated in four years with an electrical engineering degree.

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Great school

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If you are interested in being a college swimmer, and aren’t thinking like elite D1 college swimmer, then I’d echo the suggestion above for WPI. You asked for Northeast, swimming and engineering, and it has all three. My son is a current sophomore engineering double major (CivE and MechE) on the crew team. We’ve been very favorably impressed with how the coach and teammates have supported the school’s culture of experiential project work and how they make it workable to be successful as both an engineering student and an athlete. It’s a nice D3 program - no, you won’t get any athletic money and it’s not one of the big name programs, but if that’s not your level of competition, this might be a good fit for you.

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There are many options in front of you, depending on your preference to be in city/suburb/town. The ivies are a natural option (Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, etc), or schools like JHU / Tufts/WPI. All register around your swim times

How do you know what their swim times are? They haven’t been stated in the thread.

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I was wondering about this too….

Not to mention Brown and WPI are in different universes as far as swimming goes.

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The times clearly sustain these conversations…

You don’t know the nature of the “conversations,” the levels of the D1 and D3 programs, or any other details. Somebody can talk to coaches while not being realistically in the mix as a desired recruit.

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My son is going into his senior year as a biomedical engineering major at WPI, and has loved his time with the swim team there. The coaches have been fabulous, and the team supportive. One of the draws for him when he was looking at schools was how close the team was. They meet together to do homework, give advice to younger teammates on teachers and classes etc.

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From a standpoint of swimming, look at conference meet results. Most coaches target recruits who put up times that would make their conference B finals in their junior year of high school.

There are many college swim teams that have a number of engineering students on them. There are also probably a couple of college swim teams where the coach explicitly does not allow engineering as a major, or just the way things are set up makes it difficult. Find the swim teams that already have engineering majors on them.

The intersection of these two sets in the northeast gives you a pretty good starting point. Don’t get too hung up on the DI/DIII split, as there can be significant overlap between the top DIII programs and the middle DI programs.

Some coaches can help athletes with admission, but at many schools engineering has higher standards than the rest of the school. Often times the coach has no pull to get students into the majors with higher admission standards.

Engineering and a varsity sport can be done, but most people find it very demanding, especially junior and senior years. If someone really wants to do it, they probably can.

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The swimmers at Wagner (D1) would not garner interest from the Kenyon (D3) coach. There are fast and slow schools in all divisions.

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S23 was recruitable in 2 sports. WPI is full of engineering majors and is incredibly student-centered. They were one of the only schools that was amenable to engineering majors being on 2 varsity rosters. Our tour guide (who was an announcer for the athletic department and covered multiple sports) assured us that she was familiar with students that played two varsity sports.

Engineering and a varsity sport is very doable at WPI. If you look at their meet schedule, they don’t travel very far. I think that’s partly due to location and partly due to wanting to lessen the travel demands on their teams.

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