<p>Let's say you're building little airplanes in an engineering class. You might have wood, glue, and other parts out on the table so that you can build the plane. </p>
<p>Likewise it might take a good 5-10 minutes to get everything set up or put away, and get all of the saws, etc. cleaned up. </p>
<p>In light of that, working for 2+ hours for 7 weeks is better than working 1 hour for 14 weeks, since so much time is saved on cleaning up.</p>
<p>If you want to go petroleum:</p>
<p>Colorado School of Mines, Stanford, UT-Austin, Texas A&M and University of Tulsa are good. </p>
<p>A&M also has a top notch Nuclear engineering program.</p>
<p>What about Case Western and Rose-Hulman ?</p>
<p>How is engineering at Vanderbilt?</p>
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In light of that, working for 2+ hours for 7 weeks is better than working 1 hour for 14 weeks, since so much time is saved on cleaning up.
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<p>I get your point, yet I also think there's some misunderstanding or miscommunication here. Maybe somebody else can help us out here....</p>
<p>I don't think the length of each session is any longer on a quarter system as opposed to a semester system. You just mean more times per week instead, so you would spend the same amount of time cleaning up. The difference would be that you would be back in the lab sooner. Correct me if I'm wrong.</p>
<p>EDIT: I can't speak for everyone, but anecdotally... one of the brightest people I know got his bachelor's degree in engineering from Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>I don't recall having any labs in undergrad that were under three hours in length, and often times we'd stay late to finish or get ahead in the next week's lab. A number of my classes also had labs which would take much more time than the amount allotted. That time was mainly to understand what the lab was about and to ask any questions to the lab TAs and the professor.</p>
<p>Most of my labs were under three hours. However, I'm not counting labs with multiple parts that were related. I'm also not counting "labs" that were more like semester projects. We usually worked on those on our own time and not during class. The only labs that I knew of that took more than 3 hours for one part was for organic chemistry. That section was scheduled for 4 or 5 hours.</p>
<p>In my school, understanding what the lab entailed was usually taken care of during the recitation section. Any further questions were answered during the lab or during office hours.</p>