<p>i have thought about engineering alot as a major but dont know which field to choose.</p>
<li>Will biomedical engineering help prepare me for MCATS and med school?</li>
<li>What do you do in a run-of-the-mill undergrad engineering program?</li>
<li>Are the ivys (Penn, Columbia, etc.) really that bad at engineering?</li>
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<li><p>They should, but you should check with your advisor to make sure. Also keep in mind that your GPA will probably be lower with an engineering major than traditional premed. I'm fairly sure they factor the engineering thing in, but I'm not positive, so also ask your advisor.</p></li>
<li><p>Not sure what you mean. Overall, it's a lot of theory/problem sets with some labwork/coding/construction involved. Your goal is to learn how to solve engineering problems.</p></li>
<li><p>All but Cornell are ranked very low. I'm sure they teach the same stuff, but the faculty is probably lesser calibre and you don't get the wow factor with the name like you might with MIT or Caltech, or John Hopkins(only for BioE).</p></li>
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<li>Oh noooooo... <em>snags at worms that have escaped from the oft-opened can</em>.....</li>
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<li>The material at an undergraduate level is basic enough that the only real difference between Ivies, the usual Engineering giants, and lower ranked state schools is just the difficulty of the final tests.</li>
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<p>Now, some schools have a definite lab focus, so that also factors relatively heavily and should be weighted in any final decision. If you're wondering, more labs is generally seen as a good thing...</p>
<p>i disagree with you. I have seen the Stanford final tests (physics,chemistry and calculus) and i must say, after comparing them to the PSU(my school) tests, the PSU tests are tougher IMO. I've realized now that the undergrad engr. rankings are total B.S.</p>
<p>That's quite possible. I could also probably show you (many) Cal tests that would mess you up. Notice that I didn't say how "hard" the tests would be. In fact, you could probably make the case that Ivy Engineering has easier tests than a large portion of the public schools. Ivies like to graduate people with high GPAs. Publics don't give a ****.</p>
<p>Venkater:</p>
<p>I will give u a straight answer. Engineering is probably one of very few disciplines that an ivy-league degree doesnt mean too much. Sure, there are few excellent engineering schools like MIT Stanford Berkeley CMU JHU (BioE) just name a few. But by and large, for undergraduate deg (BS), there is not much difference between say #1 ranked school and #50 school. Actually, its the graduate degree thats going to help you much down the road. I know of many successful competent engineers who got a BS degree from a so-so school, got a job, got a MS, or PhD while on the job (i.e., getting paid while getting his graduate deg), came back to his job and moved up nicely.</p>
<p>Basically, if engineering is your passion, it doesnt make sense to borrow a ton of money to attend ivy leagues or big name OOS schools You will get an equivalent good solid engineering education in any decent in-state school with much less money and you will get a solid job and career. :rolleyes:</p>
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3. The material at an undergraduate level is basic enough that the only real difference between Ivies, the usual Engineering giants, and lower ranked state schools is just the difficulty of the final tests.
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</p>
<p>
[quote]
i disagree with you. I have seen the Stanford final tests (physics,chemistry and calculus) and i must say, after comparing them to the PSU(my school) tests, the PSU tests are tougher IMO. I've realized now that the undergrad engr. rankings are total B.S.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Rankings are NOT correlated with test difficulty. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true - that lower ranked programs can actually sometimes have HARDER tests. I believe this is because some of the lower-ranked schools feel that they have to test their students harder in order to compensate for the lower quality of the students they admit. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, I disagree that the engineering undergrad rankings are B.S. That's not to say that I completely believe them 100%, because I don't, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are useless. The best use of rankings is determining the quality of students for the purposes of company recruiting. The fact is, Stanford is, whether you like it or not, considered to be an elite engineering school, as evidenced by the quality of companies who recruit there. </p>
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[quote]
3. Oh noooooo... <em>snags at worms that have escaped from the oft-opened can</em>.....
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</p>
<p>
[quote]
3. All but Cornell are ranked very low. I'm sure they teach the same stuff, but the faculty is probably lesser calibre and you don't get the wow factor with the name like you might with MIT or Caltech, or John Hopkins(only for BioE).
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</p>
<p>At the risk of greatly agitating aibarr (but hey, sometimes it's fun to agitate her), I would say that even the worst Ivy engineering program is worlds better than the vast majority of engineering programs out there. Keep in mind that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of engineering programs out there, the vast majority of them being no-name programs. Whatever you might think about Ivy eng programs, I think we can all agree that they are all still better than all of those many hundreds of no-name programs.</p>
<p>So when you use terms like "that bad" or "ranked very low", I would simply ask, compared to what? Compared to MIT, sure, they may be "bad" or "low". But compared to the average engineering program, they are very good. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Basically, if engineering is your passion, it doesnt make sense to borrow a ton of money to attend ivy leagues or big name OOS schools You will get an equivalent good solid engineering education in any decent in-state school with much less money and you will get a solid job and career
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The truth is, for many of them it's not really about the engineering education per se. Many Ivy engineering students have little intention of actually working as engineers. They just study it out of general interest and/or to secure themselves a backup career. Many of them will never work as engineers for long if at all, preferring instead to work as investment bankers, management consultants, or go to law, med, or (after some work experience) business school. </p>
<p>Heck, the same is true of the engineers from even the top schools such as MIT or Stanford. Plenty of them apparently don't want to be engineers either, preferring to work as bankers or consultants, or go to law/med/business school.</p>
<p>"The truth is, for many of them it's not really about the engineering education per se. Many Ivy engineering students have little intention of actually working as engineers. They just study it out of general interest and/or to secure themselves a backup career. Many of them will never work as engineers for long if at all, preferring instead to work as investment bankers, management consultants, or go to law, med, or (after some work experience) business school. </p>
<p>Heck, the same is true of the engineers from even the top schools such as MIT or Stanford. Plenty of them apparently don't want to be engineers either, preferring to work as bankers or consultants, or go to law/med/business school."</p>
<p>Is what you just said really happening? that's a great slap in the face of all hard-working engineers. My Gods, since when engineering job has degenerated so much and only good for a back-up career?</p>
<p>No wonder this country is losing its tech edge to other countries :rolleyes:</p>
<p>
[quote]
At the risk of greatly agitating aibarr (but hey, sometimes it's fun to agitate her), I would say that even the worst Ivy engineering program is worlds better than the vast majority of engineering programs out there.
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</p>
<p>Heh. Yeah, I'm gonna sit back on this one. Y'all know my opinion. =)</p>
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Is what you just said really happening? that's a great slap in the face of all hard-working engineers. My Gods, since when engineering job has degenerated so much and only good for a back-up career?</p>
<p>No wonder this country is losing its tech edge to other countries
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</p>
<p>Hey, I'm just telling you what is happening. I am just the messenger here. Don't shoot the messenger. Even if I had said nothing, the fact is, plenty of MIT and Stanford engineers (and Ivy engineers) would rather be working at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs than at an engineering company. </p>
<p>As aibarr knows well, I think the real problem is that most engineering companies are simply unwilling to offer the kind of pay and career-accelerating opportunities that the consulting firms and investment banks offer. A lot of people figure, why make 60k to start when you can make 130k+ in your first year as a Wall Street investment banker? Why be stuck working somewhere in some factory website when you can live a jetsetting life, visiting some of the world's most glamorous cities, staying in the finest hotels, and eating at the world's best restaurants (all at company expense) as a management consultant? {I ain't kidding - I know a former engineer who's worked as a consultant for a few years and has at worked in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Toronto, Montreal, Madrid, Rome, Dublin, Brussels, Prague, and Budapest, all at company expense}. Why slog your way through the engineering ranks when by working for 2 years at McKinsey, you can put yourself in contention for admission to Harvard Business School? Why? </p>
<p>It's a free market for talent out there, and the best students are going to want to pursue the best opportunities. The best students want to advance their careers. As long as the banks and consulting firms are seen as offering better opportunities than the engineering firms do, either in reality or simply as a matter of perception, then you are always going to have the best engineering students migrating to consulting and banking, and the engineering firms have nobody to blame but themselves. If they want the best talent, they have to offer better opportunities. If they refuse, then they should not be surprised to find people wanting to work elsewhere. That's how free markets are supposed to work. </p>
<p>Now, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't go so far as to say that engineering jobs have 'degenerated' and that they are only good for backup careers. Clearly, engineering jobs are far better than the average job that the average college graduate out there can get, mostly because the average college graduate comes from a no-name school with a liberal arts degree. I once showed that even the average engineer coming out of New Mexico Tech makes a higher starting salary than the average student coming out of Princeton, simply because many Princeton graduates are liberal arts graduates who can't get anything better than low-paying jobs (which is incidentally a big reason why so many of them prefer to go to graduate school). Even the average chemical engineering student from an average school make about 2/3 more than a Princeton student who majored in Art/Archaeology. </p>
<p><a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/data/surveys/CareerSurveyReport2005.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/data/surveys/CareerSurveyReport2005.html</a>
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/Careers/04/20/class.2005/index.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/Careers/04/20/class.2005/index.html</a></p>
<p>So I actually think engineering jobs are actually quite good, relative to the average job out there. It's just that engineering jobs have difficulty competing with the high-glamour jobs of consulting and banking.</p>