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<p>Pretty sure that big companies like GAFAM recruit widely, since they have the recruiting resources to do so, and they need to because they need more people.</p>
<p>It is the smaller companies and startups that have more limited recruiting reach (often just local and a few non-local schools that they are willing to travel to). They are also harder to find and apply to (in contrast to every CS major in the country knowing who GAFAM are and applying to them).</p>
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<p>Columbia is well known nationally, but I heard little or nothing about NYU before reading stuff on these forums, and much of the NYU stuff around these forums revolved around being expensive with poor financial aid and high student debt (but students are attracted to it for the NYC experience). NYU-proper also does not have engineering, though it is currently merging with PINYU, which is not especially well known nationally.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus,</p>
<p>OK, I’m beginning to see the pattern. Schools with “National appeal” are schools that have:
…membership in the Ivy League
…NCAA exposure
…the writer’s attention ;-)</p>
<p>This is how it seems to play out on this site. If someone hasn’t heard of a school, that school either sucks or is limited regionally, in their opinion. Evidence to the contrary be damned. </p>
<p>Polytechnic Institute is only one of a group of diversified schools within NYU, several of which are considered to be the best in the world. The NYU Tisch School of the Arts is that one that immediately came to mind as I wrote that initial list of four. I deliberately selected two schools which not only had National appeal, but Global. Granted, Poly wasn’t my focus, but at the time I was making that list, the point was more about schools located remotely versus schools located in major metro areas and the geographic distribution of their alumni. Since students flock to Tisch from all over the world… a true GLOBAL appeal… and since Tisch has produced so many incredibly successful actors and directors… and since incredibly famous actors and directors often teach there… I didn’t even consider anyone would NOT have heard of NYU. </p>
<p>Their law school is another school with incredibly famous alum and prominent professors.</p>
<p>And let’s not forget the point that was being made. Context is everything, after all. 
It appears most of the alum of NYU stay (or are at least live a large part of the year) in the Northeast. So the fact that that a schools alumni would choose to stay close has little to do with the “National appeal” of the school and, IMHO, more to do with the availability of jobs and local standards of living.</p>
<p>Yes, this is a difference of opinions, not facts.</p>
<p>But I am now certain of how people on this site judge schools. If the writer knows about the school for whatever reason, it’s a “National appeal” school. If they never heard of it, it’s either regional or junk. </p>
<p>… and again, evidence to the contrary be damned.</p>
<p>Which leads me back to my “we need better rankings” argument. If we had that, we wouldn’t have these opinionated conversations about which are regional in nature and which are national. ;-)</p>
<p>Since this is a thread about engineering in an engineering subforum, should it be surprising that people here may not have any particular awareness of NYU (which, until the merger with PI/PINYU, did not even have engineering for decades)? NYU may have high visibility in the New York metro area, but has rather little out west.</p>
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<p>You probably have the first two correct in terms of general national awareness (although technically the Ivy League is a subset of NCAA Division I).</p>
<p>Beyond that, national exposure is context related. Those into visual and performing arts may know NYU Tisch well (though it is not the only school known for that), but engineers may not know or have a reason to know NYU in the context of their jobs (since NYU proper does not have engineering).</p>
<p>Of course, knowledge of schools is regional. People in the New York metro area are more likely to know about NYU and several other area schools (Hunter, Baruch, Stony Brook, Fordham, etc.) than those elsewhere.</p>
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<p>Incorrect assumption. Just because you have not heard of a school does not mean that it is junk.</p>
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You’re 26. You’ve been out of school for what?.. 3 or 4 years? I’m certain there are a lot of schools you’ve never met a graduate from.</p>
<p>I was on the London Eye about a decade ago and a very small child (maybe four or five) said to her mother it was the most awesome thing in her whole life. Then emphasized “My WHOLE life!”, as if that was a very long time. ;-)</p>
<p>Ahhh… you gotta love youth.</p>
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<p>I don’t think anyone here in this thread has suggested that all such schools (or any such schools for that matter) are bad schools. It has only been suggested that they don’t have the national reputation of certain other schools and don’t tend to send graduates to many places outside of the region with the same frequency of other schools, so if the OP’s goal was to go work in California, for example, some of these smaller schools may not be the ideal situation for them.</p>
<p>There is, of course, a general problem on this message board with people dismissing any school they have not heard of as bad, but that is a separate issue.</p>
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<p>But the point was being made in the context of an engineering education and a subsequent engineering career. Whether or not artists or lawyers from NYU stay in the area (which is already known for being a center for the arts and law firms) is rather irrelevant to the discussion. The whole discussion was about whether an engineer from such a school has the same appeal to employers nationally as one from Purdue or Michigan or another flyover school all else being equal. In that context, NYU is not known for engineering. As ucbalumnus pointed it, it has been years since they had any sort of engineering program up until the PINYU merger just recently, so it has close to zero reputation there outside of the region at the moment.</p>
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<p>Some people do judge schools that way, and it is wrong. However, it is not unreasonable to classify a school as regional when the overwhelming majority of its graduates are staying in the region and the companies actively recruiting said school are from within the same region. If a student’s goal is to get a job in the region, that school may be absolutely fantastic for them. If they want to get a job elsewhere where the employers are not familiar with the school, then that school may not be the best choice for said student. That is the central tenet of my position.</p>
<p>And yes, the ranking systems are bad. They do an okay job of placing the big schools into rough tiers, but do tend to leave the little schools behind. However, is that something that is really all that useful? In my opinion, it is better to simply encourage students not to put so much emphasis on rankings and go to a school that has a history of placing its students into jobs or graduate schools in which a prospective student is interested. Then it doesn’t really matter what the rankings say.</p>
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<p>Eureka! We actually agree… somewhat. I agree the data is tainted, but in the absence of anything else, it must be considered. One can only hope the same biases run through the data sets. </p>
<p>BTW, this fatally flawed survey technique is the main reason I hate the USNews ranking system so much. </p>
<p>The rest of the stuff you wrote. I really don’t agree. I actually spent quite a bit of time answering all your points with my counterpoints, but in the end I don’t think we’ll move each other off of our opinions.</p>
<p>A few of things …
You clearly don’t appreciate the magnitude of the difference between a place like Atlanta and a place like New York City. New York doesn’t even have a borough that small. Atlanta is only the size of a large New York neighborhood.</p>
<p>And the graduating class from Georgia Tech rivals, if not overshadows, the metroNY graduating classes of Steven, Fu Foundation, NYU-Poly, Forham, NJIT, etc… It would be interesting to add them all up and see how they compare. I’m sure Georgia Tech outnumbers them by a good margin. You are confusing number of universities with number of graduates.</p>
<p>When we are talking about competitive universities, I don’t believe any of them only have regional appeal. Graduates from Stevens, NYU-Poly, Northeastern… and the like… command high starting salaries and have fantastic placement stats… in most cases as good as or better than the schools you claim have a broader national appeal. How can that be?! Broader appeal would mean more opportunities, would it not? There are plenty of other reasons for geographic distribution, which I have already outlined. Just because most of a school’s graduates stay local doesn’t mean they only have regional appeal. You’re completely missing the forest for the trees.</p>
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<p>Welcome to the world of academia. </p>
<p>Having graduated from a somewhat lesser known private school myself (atleast outside of engineering and aviation), I know what it’s like having to defend your school to people who have never heard of it, or are unfamiliar with it. As demoralizing as it is sometimes, you eventually just have to come to grips with the fact that the academic community is very ‘cliquish’… powerful names reign supreme in this exclusionary community. </p>
<p>That being said, what others think of a particular school they are unfamiliar with is irrelevant - The important thing is knowing what potential employers think. And from my experience, there exists a big mismatch between what the average Joe thinks and what employers think.</p>
<p>@maikai, </p>
<p>My point is that if Stevens was such a well known or nationally recruited for engineering, I would have heard a lot about it or met an engineering grad from stevens by now. I have met people from most all of the well known engineering schools. I work for a company thats based pretty close to Stevens too.</p>
<p>and again this is just my personal experience.</p>
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<p>Being known mainly regionally in a region where there are a lot of high paying jobs is a good place to be. Many of the smaller companies recruit mainly locally due to convenience; national appeal matters less in that context.</p>
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<p>Rehash of same flawed logic you’ve been using all along. 
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<p>You are ignoring the “regional” school’s often higher placement rates and higher average salaries than the schools you claim have to have national demand. Logic would dictate that schools with national demand would have far higher placement rates and salaries. This is not the case. </p>
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<p>No, actually the context of those paragraphs was “What made a school only regionally demanded?”, so including NYU was fair game. NYU is a clear example of a globally recognized and demanded university whose graduates generally stay in the NE. Same with Columbia, an Ivy League school that no one can claim would not have a national appeal. If the percentages of graduates who stay local from both Columbia and NYU are similar, remind me again why one is a nationally demanded school and the other is not?</p>
<p>To be fair, Columbia has a higher average of students leaving the area, but they don’t disperse into the US. They go international. IMHO, they are the international kids who came here to attend and always planned on going home. If you factor out these international departures and only consider geographic distribution within the US, the stats are close between the schools. I actually did this research awhile back when I had a very similar argument with someone else on this site.</p>
<p>To your point about the performing arts, why the distinction between the arts and the local technology environment? The number of labs and research facilities we have in just the metroNY area is impressive. Consider the megalopolis and it’s staggering. The total available market for semiconductors in the megalopolis is one of the highest, if not THE highest in the country. It certainly boosts the largest number of companies using semis in the country. Just like the performing arts could be thought as having two main centers, California and New York, the tech industry can be thought of as East Coast and West Coast. </p>
<p>And who the heck says NYU-POLY has zero national reputation? There you go again! If YOU haven’t heard of it, it sucks? Unbelievable! Do you realize the graduates of NYU-POLY out-earn every single school you listed? If that’s the cost of going to a “regional” school, I’m sure every graduate will pay it… gladly.</p>
<p>This idea of companies only recruiting from specific universities and universities only having regional appeal is so pervasive. They are nothing more than grossly erroneous opinions that have been repeated so many times, and for so long, people accept them as fact.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus,</p>
<p>And we finally agree. </p>
<p>Although I still take issue over the method and metrics people are using to bestow some colleges with national appeal and other colleges with regional appeal… especially when two colleges are situated within miles of each other and have very similar geographic distribution stats.</p>
<p>hopingforbetter,</p>
<p>Hey! All my bickering with the others almost made me miss your post! :-</p>
<p>I think getting to about $100K in the time frame you’re talking about might be aggressive, but within reach if you make sure you’re building the right kind of experience. “The right kind” of experience will depend on where you want to take your career.</p>
<p>Take care picking your first jobs. I know you’ll be nervous, but in a very real sense you’ll be interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Know the market the company is in and know their place in that market. Know about the last several product releases and what those releases meant for the company?. Were they ground breaking or just “next gen” stuff? What technical challenges does the company have. Who are their competitors and how do their competitor’s product compare? Your point is not to show how much you know. Use the information to have a meaningful discussion with your interviewers. Ask what they do. Recognize what part of the products they impact. Ask about the open position and the experience you’ll gain in that position. </p>
<p>You want your first and second jobs (at least) to be technically challenging for you. This is the point where you’ll eat, drink, sleep, dream, and poop the job. You’re looking to make a mark, solve a problem, make yourself a recognized asset of your department. Don’t worry about the money. Just make sure you’re “in the range” of what’s normally expected. Your goal is to make yourself a recognized asset. Once that happens, ask for a raise. IMHO, you want three years at your first job. </p>
<p>You want to demonstrate, first and foremost you are a team player and value working for the company. Help when you can. Enable when you can. Empower when you can. I don’t want to get all religious on you, because that’s not me… at all… I am not a religious guy. But there is one saying that IS true. “Throw your bread upon the waters and it will come back to you ten fold.” Take this from someone who has been far luckier than I ever deserved. </p>
<p>You want to drive for the big successes, but don’t ever forget about creating a critical mass of smaller stuff along the way. And early on, that critical mass of smaller stuff may be the only thing you can work on. </p>
<p>Show your management you take every task and ever schedule seriously. Care about the quality of your work and how it’s performance/appearance will reflect on your company.</p>
<p>Be a problem solver. If something doesn’t look right or act right to you, speak up.</p>
<p>Think seriously about the skills you lack or what you need to be more proficient at. Talk with your manager about how to address that. If you have a decent manager, treat them as a partner in your career, because that’s exactly what they are. Again, if you can’t get the skills at work, get them at home, but get them. </p>
<p>If you feel unappreciated, make the case and ask a buddy from college to be your sanity checker. Don’t ever start griping to coworkers. Oddly enough, when you’re young and in your twenties, I think it’s OK to sleep with them, but manage it… don’t let it become weird… don’t “dump” anyone. And again, the worst thing you can do is start griping, screw with the department’s moral, and start a complain chain!</p>
<p>IMHO, you should work at your first job for a minimum of two years. So three years might not raise my eyebrow, but two years and one day surely would. Less than two years and I think something bad happened. It could be your boss, but it could be YOU. In any case, I’ll think you chose the wrong job when you first went looking, which shows bad judgement. So pick somewhere you know you can stay for awhile.</p>
<p>Go enjoy the weekends, but be the guy that also looks forward to Monday.</p>
<p>If you do all that for your first 4 or 5 years, you’ll be making $100K, or more. </p>
<p>If you’re the guy that knows Wednesday is “hump day” and can’t wait for Friday to arrive, you won’t.</p>
<p>fractalmstr,</p>
<p>True dat!</p>
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<p>PINYU really does have almost no reputation out west. Note that no reputation is neutral, not bad. And lack of any reputation (good or bad) does not mean that it is a bad school.</p>
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<p>Being an almost entirely engineering school in a region with high pay levels, it is not surprising that graduates do well in your favorite Payscale rankings (but not in these ones for engineering majors, though they lump all engineering majors together and only list the top 20: [Best</a> College ROI by Engineering Major](<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/college-roi-2013/college-roi-2013-schools-by-major/engineering]Best”>Best College ROI by Computer Science Major) ). That does not mean that it has national reputation of any kind (good or bad). Of course, the lack of national reputation by itself does not mean that the school is good or bad.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus,</p>
<p>There is a distinction between being unknown and the appeal of the college to employers. I take issue with the idea that some colleges are in national demand and some colleges are good only if you want to live in their regions. With a degree from NYU-POLY, Stevens, RPI or any other of these excellent, but supposedly regional universities, a graduate can go anywhere in the country fairly easily.</p>
<p>Yes, there are some stupid companies and HR departments that don’t do their job, but most successful public companies will consider all comers. If they don’t know a school, they make it their business to find out about it, because they are looking for talent from all corners… not just Palookaville U. The later is a recipe for disaster. </p>
<p>There is a plethora of corporate training that most companies put their managers through, mine included, that teach diversity (I’m not talking religion or race here) of ideas and perspectives is of high value.</p>
<p>As for ROI…
A return on investment comparison and a straight comparison on average pay are two different things.</p>
<p>NYU-POLY is a fairly expensive school… as are their competitors (Stevens, RPI, etc…). Their costs are all nearly identical. But I can’t let myself get started on my cost collusion rant. ;-)</p>
<p>It would make sense that they aren’t topping the ROI list. As I’ve mentioned before, I have been far luckier than I ever deserved to be, so my son will have few financial concerns. He is taking out $5K per year in loans, only so he has “some skin in the game.” ROI is not a concern for me. Straight comparisons of income interest me far more.</p>
<p>I continue to be surprised that Cooper Union and places like it (Military academies, Webb Institute, etc…) don’t head that list. Tuition is free at those places, so one would think the ROI would be through the roof. Cooper is listed, but 7th. There must be some other metric being thrown in. But like I said, ROI was never an important factor for me.</p>
<p>Couldn’t help but notice the other schools, those big national demand schools I’ve been talking about with another poster are not on this list either.</p>
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<p>Just because it is not making sense to you doesn’t mean it is flawed, and you have yet to present one real piece of evidence as to why what I am saying is false.</p>
<p>I already addressed why I dismiss placement rates. The method by which they are collected is flawed in a statistical sense, so that statistic is flawed. Yes, there is no good alternative, but just because there is no good alternative doesn’t mean I have to use a bad statistic.</p>
<p>It is also true, that I am ignoring average starting salary. It isn’t for the reason you seem to assume, though. Starting salary is highly regional. Schools whose graduates tend to remain in the region will tend to have salaries reflecting the cost of living and average pay in that region. Schools whose graduates branch out to a variety of geographic locations are going to tend to fall a lot closer to the national average salary since the graduates are being placed nationally. Surprisingly to many, the starting salary is not all that dependent on the school you attended. If you hold all else equal, a graduate coming from a more well-respected school might earn a couple thousand dollars a year more than someone else for the same job in the same metropolitan area. To be clear, I mean well-respected in the eyes of the company doing the hiring, not necessarily US News or any other ranking organization.</p>
<p>So to summarize that, I think it is fantastic that these schools do a good job of placing their students. It means that a reasonable number of companies value their graduates and the students attending the schools </p>
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[/quote=maikai]
There is a distinction between being unknown and the appeal of the college to employers. I take issue with the idea that some colleges are in national demand and some colleges are good only if you want to live in their regions. With a degree from NYU-POLY, Stevens, RPI or any other of these excellent, but supposedly regional universities, a graduate can go anywhere in the country fairly easily.
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<p>If that is the point you were making then you were missing the point. I fail to see the relevance of how in-demand art graduates are to a forum/thread discussing engineering degrees. This is particularly true due to the fact that, in the engineering world, the overall prestige of your school matters very little. The reputation of the engineering department in particular is what matters to most engineering recruiters.</p>
<p>If the percentages of engineering graduates that stay local are the same from Columbia and NYU, then I would say neither is any more regional or national than the other. I have yet to see any evidence to that, however. If they both have the vast majority of their engineering graduates staying local, I would then say that they are both most likely fairly regional engineering programs. The last thing to look at would be what companies try to hire their graduates.</p>
<p>If a variety of national companies are still at least trying to hire their graduates into non-local jobs and just not being all that successful with it, then I would certainly still call that school one with national appeal and assume the graduates are staying local because of the fact that they can find great jobs locally. I make no distinction as to why a school is not heavily recruited nationally when I look at these places. It very well may be that the school used to be recruited heavily nationally and a lot of the non-local companies got tired of not luring graduates away and so no longer specifically target that school. To me, that would make the school regional since those national companies are no longer targeting those graduates specifically, even though the reason for this has nothing to do with quality of the school.</p>
<p>Plain and simple, if a school is appealing to companies nationwide, then at least some of those companies will be recruiting at that school. This says nothing necessarily about the relative academic strength of that school. There are plenty of very good schools that are worthy of praise that are relatively unknown outside of the region they serve.</p>
<p>So, to be clear, regional schools can still be very good schools. At no point have I stated anything to the contrary.</p>
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<p>I say NYU-Poly has close to zero reputation because it does have close to zero reputation. Very few people have heard of it, including hiring managers, once you leave the NYC area. I will go back again and say that this does not mean it is a bad school, particularly if it gets strongly recruited in the NYC area. It just means that, since very few people west of the Appalachians or south of the Potomac have heard of it, then a graduate would have a more difficult time getting a job in those regions without prior experience.</p>
<p>And again, just to be clear once again: at no point have I said that just because I am not familiar with a school it is a bad school. I have, in fact, gone out of my way to not pass judgement on the quality of a school’s graduates just because of my lack of familiarity. Please stop putting words in my mouth. I have never once expressed this sentiment and, further, have expressed disdain for the times when this sentiment does get expressed on these boards.</p>
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<p>That isn’t true. There are even some of the companies whose target school lists you can actually find. I know I have seen, for example, the list of target schools for Lockheed-Martin before, for example. Much as I have said, it consisted of the large, well-known universities in engineering, regional universities that LMCO deems to have solid or good engineering programs and a handful of outliers that most likely represent a school that LMCO just happens to have a good track record with in the past. They are just one example.</p>
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<p>Interesting aside: I read the other day that Cooper Union is planning to start charging tuition for the first time ever ([NY</a> Times Article](<a href=“Cooper Union Will Charge Tuition in 2014 - The New York Times”>Cooper Union Will Charge Tuition in 2014 - The New York Times)). It’s kind of sad, really. That was a really interesting and unique thing they had going there.</p>
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<p>If I was given the choice of $80k a year in NYC versus $70k a year in Toledo, I’d consider the offer for Toledo considerably better compensation.</p>
<p>I’ll also agree with boneh3ad about how going to a regional school can be good. I can assure you there are more engineers from Cal State LA working at JPL than from NYU. Just as, I’m sure, there are more Stephens graduates working at Johnson & Johnson in Jersey than USC grads.</p>
<p>I’m also not sure if it’s true “national appeal” schools must have higher placement rates. I know for my undergrad, a number of local companies assumed our graduates felt they were too good to work at their place, so they didn’t bother recruiting. At a local school you’re more likely to have strong local industry connections where schools feed their students to particular employees (a good example of this is probably the oil and gas industry in the South).</p>
<p>maikai,</p>
<p>God! That was an incredible advice(s). I have copied that entire thing into a word document (I want to remember every single line). Thank you so much.</p>