D accepted to both A&M and UT Engineering (mechanical). While a lot comes down to school “fit”, I’m wondering if others can weigh in on comparisons between the two engineering programs – differences, level of difficulty, strengths, internships, job placement, etc.
My liberal environmentalist son agonized over the same decision and chose TAMU. His decision was however more about fit (who would have thought?..I can elaborate but it seems that this isn’t what your asking about). Educationally he felt both programs were comperable. He’s done great and is very happy with the choice. This semester is the start of his junior year and he has a summer internship with a company he is excited about working for. I will tell you what I told him. Your daughter can’t make a bad choice. Goodluck.
Two daughters currently in the same engineering program at A&M and both also looked at UT. Both are great schools with high rankings, obviously, and it was the smaller town fit with lots of traditions that appealed to them both. Both found the level of difficulty at A&M to be high as there are lots of kids who don’t make it through the program each year. However, it has been the internships and that Aggie network that has been the most impressive to me. Even my youngest, a freshman, has a summer internship lined up with a firm who recruited on campus. Interviewing, sometimes panel interviews, and traveling to different companies for follow-ups has been invaluable for both my kids and the university provided a lot of help getting prepared. I believe the engineering career fair is the largest in the country (I think that is what I heard) with a waiting list of companies wanting to attend. Remember --both schools are great choices and I think she will be happy wherever she decides to go!
The trick is as everyone else has mentioned, both are great programs with great resources and great connections.Both schools have lots of distractions, lots of things to do, and plenty of extracurricular and sport opportunities to utilize as an escape. Both schools are going to try to weed your daughter out, where they take in a large amount of engineering students and try to whittle the class size down during their four years there. She needs to pick a school she feels more passionate about and more comfortable in. If she isn’t comfortable or excited about where she is, the dreamkiller engineering courses are going to wreck her. Have her visit both programs and let her pick the program for her if both programs are financially an option for her.
@MechanicalFox is right about the weed out courses. I don’t have a child at A&M, but UT has major weed out for engineering. Many end up changing majors. I think this happens at many of the larger public schools with ranked engineering programs (Michigan, Purdue). May not happen at top 50-100 Universities (like Univ. of Alabama or Univ. of Oklahoma) which also have ABET engineering programs and awesome scholarships for strong students. Sometimes stronger students get weeded out of engineering at top 10 ranked departments as classes and competition is much tougher than other lower ranked ABET programs.
I have heard that smaller schools like Rose-Hulman don’t practice weeding. Once admitted, they nurture each student and help them get through the courses (don’t know for sure if this is actually the case).
I am under the same impressions as EventHorizons for the assumptions about smaller schools and the 50-100 Universities. I can confirm that TAMU tries really hard to weed students out. It depends on which engineering program your D is going to be in, who the adviser is and if he/she knows what he/she is doing advising, what your D will do as extracurriculars, and the timing of everything.
For me, I actually was a weed out at Texas A&M University engineering. I transferred from Purdue into the Ocean engineering and was excited about that because it was a smaller program. After completing freshman coursework and sophomore general engineering course work, I was still in courses with large lecture halls with the Civil Engineering program students. Civil Engineering is a large program that weeds out its students and gears everything mostly towards working for an oil company. I wanted to learn and master naval and ocean architecture and wasn’t interested in the oil company route (or at least in the same job areas Civil Engineers were competing for). The courses were still throwing out absurd amounts of homework for me to do to master simple concepts like free body diagrams, my courses involved lectures over information that I wouldn’t be tested on only to be tested on information we weren’t entirely going over in class (not sure if this is intentional or not). All because the Civil engineering program was just too big. I got tired of it and switched out. I had mostly A’s and B’s, only 1C in Engineering Statistics, and then 1 D in Differential Equations because I legitimately could not understand the teacher. On a retake I easily got a B in DiffyQ. I am awful at statistics though. In the end, I expected my sophomore and junior year to be filled with smaller courses focused on educating me and fellow ocean engineering students, not trying to get me to change majors so late in the game. Sometimes I regret not sticking with it, but at the time I was the president of an organization and had a lot going on in my personal life and decided that I just didn’t have the time to deal with a program that wanted me to fail all the time. Classes will never be easy, and they shouldn’t be, but I did feel the amount being thrown at me was a bit ludicrous at times. Ocean Engineering is now under the Civil program so my experience makes a lot more sense and would be something I would have expected out of the program now in days. Back when I applied, it was a standalone program, or at least sold to me as such.
Moral of the story, weed out classes and engineering drop outs are very situational. The majority of drop outs are your stereotypical poor grade situations. A lot of it just depends on how your D handles herself and what her expectations are for her career. I can tell you my friends whose parents force their students into engineering did not do well, because the student wasn’t passionate or enthusiastic enough to even find the desire to deal with all the crud thrown his/her way. Students who decided to be engineers themselves who prioritize over anything else, typically do great! There are a handful of us that just had expectations for the program that were too different than what A&M executed the program with.
If its any consolation, I applied to get a second bachelors in mechanical engineering and have been accepted to 6/7 out of state schools I have applied to with my TAMU engineering credits. So if she decides she doesn’t like it, still wants to be an engineer, and has great grades, her doors will be wide open to transfer.