<p>Hi all, I need some help figuring out what colleges to look at. I'm a junior right now, and I don't have too specific of an idea as to my major or career, but it will probably be in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) field. It would be great if someone could point me towards some top ranking colleges known for these fields or something to help me find such schools. I don't want to blindly assess colleges just based on their ranking of course, but it certainly doesn't hurt. By the way, I do not wish to do anything with medicine - too much time, and I suck at biology lol. Some good STEM schools I'm already familiar with are:
University of Maryland - College Park (national ranking 62)
Stevens Institute of Technology (national ranking 82)
VA Tech (national ranking 69)
MIT (national ranking 7)</p>
<p>These next ones I added to my list purely based on rank and location and would appreciate insight into if they're good for my intended areas of interest:
University of DE (national ranking 75)
Penn State (national ranking 37)
University of Penn (national ranking 7)
University of Florida (national ranking 49)
Northwestern (national ranking 12)
Northeastern (national ranking 49)</p>
<p>Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>Look into other [url=“<a href=“http://theaitu.org%22%5DAITU%5B/url”>http://theaitu.org”]AITU[/url</a>] schools as well.</p>
<p>RPI and Univ of Rochester have great engineering programs. </p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon
Johns Hopkins
Rice University (personal favorite) 
Georgia Tech
Purdue
University of Michigan
University of Texas-Austin
Reed College
Harvey Mudd College
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology</p>
<p>University of Illinois Urbana Champaign #5!</p>
<p>Way to broad a category to work with. Generalized STEM rankings don’t really mean much because some schools are great at some aspects of STEM (like Carnegie Mellon with Computer Science, Computer Engineering, etc.) and not so great with others (like Carnegie Mellon with pure sciences like non-computational biology).</p>
<p>I’d first think about what exact flavor of STEM you want to work with- what draws you to STEM? Is it the innovation? Then look for research-heavy programs that do the type of innovation you’re excited about. The money? Return-on-investment rankings are pretty common, but be sure to adjust them for cost-of-living because colleges that have a lot of graduates living in the Bay Area tend to get ranked higher on the list than they should be. The precision? The intellectual rigor? There’s always a program out there that has the same fascination with STEM that you do, that’s incredibly similar to something that you would’ve built yourself- and instead of looking at rankings, it’s up to you to find that program.</p>