Again, I suspect engineering is harder (especially BME) and is on par with every other elite school (I saw some of those materials from Vandy and they were…rough to say the least). Outside of that, STEM is certainly harder than at non-competitive/selective schools but there are many other selective schools where it is certainly “worse” (I hate this descriptor. To me, what most people would say is “worse” is actually the appropriate way to teach and test science- as in, difficulty is not based on volume of content or “trickiness” but on the level of thinking requested from the student) on average in terms of the level of material and exams thrown at students. My point being, engineering appears a bit rougher than say…the life/natural science majors there unless one is just that type of thinker that would rather have what lots of students consider harder/unfair problems than content overload in classes. Most top performing students from HS are used to dealing with high content volume and lesser so that plus the deeper thinking required in many engineering problems. I am one that definitely veers away from content overload classes in favor of the other, but I don’t think I’m representative of a majority and exam averages kind of show it (often higher in fast-paced classes mainly based on content knowledge and fact regurgitation or plug-and-chug type of classes). For most, engineering plus pre-med is indeed a risk unless you can definitely envision oneself as an engineer in the future no matter what happens with medical school.