Can you let me know names of very competitive , stressful colleges in science and engineering areas. My daughter although very intelligent but don’t want to go to a very stressful colleges.
I heard MIT, UCB, U Chicago etc. are very stressful. What are other sunch colleges?
Thanks,
I’ve heard that Johns Hopkins is stressful. Swarthmore I’ve heard called “Sweatmore.” Of the women’s colleges, Wellesley is known for being relatively competitive.
Colleges with excellent academics in STEM (but not engineering) and where the students are cooperative with each other, and not (or markedly less) competitive, include Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke. Also for engineering look at Olin, Rose-Hulman and Union. Smith has engineering and STEM and is a women’s college.
Vanderbilt, Northwestern, and CIT are also really stressful.
Princeton is stressful for premed and it’s not guaranteed that you’ll end up in med school afterwards because of grade deflation (I’ve heard). I’ve heard mixed things about Harvard. Some people find it okay and others are in tears every day – and mom is worried deeply.
Every top college will be stressful for pre med.
@/Dusty feathers, you are right about PU. My friend’s daughter got into PU - EE last year. She says is it is brutal of there, half of the students dropped out of EE, moved to arts and other areas. Same story I hear for PU Physics. What u think of CMU?
I’ve heard that to ameliorate the stress issues at Berkeley in the early tough years of engineering and premed, there’s a guy there who started a support program. If your child is lucky enough to join. He’s a professor and was featured in the NYTs several years back. I looked him up at the time and we spoke on the phone. He let me know that the intention of his group was to keep students in those weeder fields, that he’d seen too many talented students get tossed out of premed and engineering because of the weeder mentality. If I may, I think the weeder mentality philosophy runs that to weed means to get rid of the weak students and will result in better engineers and doctors. For some this doesn’t ring true, and they feel that in fact you’re getting rid of maybe some weak students, but also a lot of talent that can be nurtured. In fact in competitive programs, the students inclined to cooperate may be the ones weeded out. Cooperation may be something extremely useful in these careers.
For example, at Berkeley, this person told me, that part of the weeding was caused by the lack of human connection. For example they we’re assigned numbers rather than names (at the time we talked. I’m not sure what the practice is now. He may have been working to change this.) The classes were huge, adding to anonymity and feelings of being alone. A small downtick in grades and the advisory board at the time would inform the student that they would have no chance at med school or engineering, because the advising wasn’t attuned to the individual student’s strengths and other opportunities. That sort of thing.
His group worked to support students from Day 1. They built trust and then if they ran into problems, his group advised them of alternate routes. There are plenty of alternate routes, apparently. (I’ve learned since about the various post-bac programs for grade recovery, for example, or people who started in completely different professions and then turned to posbacs to get their premed courses.) His program helped stanch the bleed from Berkeley’s weeder programs. His philosophy was that weeding didn’t necessarily produce the best physicians or engineers. It produced the best test takers. Many talented people, for a small stumble, were weeded out. Maybe those with better empathy or other skills were lost with the weeder process.
In any event, I was like: soooo what’s a parent to do? How do we find supportive programs? He said the best thing to do is to get away from the tour group and go to the dining halls or lounge areas. Ask the students there: what support does this school provide if you run into academic trouble in these courses? As a prospective student, you’re looking for support at the departmental level, not school wide, he said. School wide they don’t have the expertise (according to this guy) to advise about a particular career path or about the content of a particular course. This info is several years old and outdated but I think the basic info is sound.
I can’t find the NYT article that featured the Berkeley guy, but here’s a NYT article about how some schools are trying to end the weeder mentality. This may be somewhat helpful despite the age of the article.–
What makes a lot of the top colleges stressful is that they only admit kids that were in the top 5% or 10% of their high school classes, and it can be tough for a kid who was always in the top 5% to all of a sudden be only average or below average for the first time in their lives. When you combine that with parental expectations, it can be difficult for an 18 year old to cope. All good STEM schools are going to push your daughter to see how much she could achieve. The key to managing that is know what you want to get out of a program and that it is OK to try something and fail – that simply tells you what your child’s boundaries are, not that the kid is a failure.
The material in engineering/STEM courses is difficult. I think any top college will be stressful.
@Dustyfeathers The article you linked to is good, but the comments may be even better. We’re very happy our oldest child had a project-based design class freshman year to provide some hands-on work. It was actually the first year with that in the design class and it made it tough, but very rewarding. Plenty of food for thought in that article and the comments for us to consider as we help guide our next kid into engineering.
I learned some colleges like Tuft, use collaborative approach, rather zero sum game , one student gaining on others weekness ( e.g. Weeding out say 10% students of the class).
Also do u think engineering line much tougher compare to science stream for same college - in general?
@Andy786 I think that engineering tends to be tougher from what I’ve heard here on CC and from articles I’ve read, because of 1) the content and 2) the way it’s taught. For awhile I thought that one of my kids would be headed toward engineering so I looked into it. I think that there are places that support students better than others, as I’ve indicated above. My personal choices for my kids would have been ones already mentioned: Smith, Olin, Rose-Hulman, WPI. These schools vary greatly in terms of personality, but they seem to all be fairly supportive. Union, maybe too, but the party culture didn’t appeal to me. Also I’d look closely at two smaller schools that hardly are mentioned, both state schools and inexpensive even for OOSers. One is New Mexico Tech the other is SD Mines and Tech. They offer amazingly high level academics and some other cool stuff. NMT blows up a car like every Tuesday or something for research and it’s research is strong. SD has excellent employment opportunities and its grads are some of the highest paid directly after graduation. Because of their size they may offer more personalized approach, if your child wants to go to either of those schools. One of my children looked closely at one of these schools and felt that it was a strong possibility for a short while. (This coming from an East Coaster from a Big City no less. I cared mainly about whether there was a bagel shop nearby . . . and then I knew child would be basically okay.) Another school that I looked at for awhile at least was Sweet Briar but people have mentioned that it’s coming up for it’s ABET accreditation review and it’s unclear how that will go. But if it goes well, and you have a girl, that might be another extremely supportive program to look into. ABET has a page where you can check to see if any given program is accredited, BTW.
My D’s at RPI in engineering and she says that it’s cooperative rather than competitive. Most courses are tough as the academic level is high, but it’s not super stressful. While she has to study hard, she’s happy there and doesn’t feel tons of pressure.
STEM is hard because the curriculum is demanding. Top STEM schools like MIT, UC-B, Stanford, Cal Tech, Illinois, Carnegie Mellon are probably more stressful because the competition is higher.
@insanedreamer , good to know RPI is collaborative . RPI is one of our shortlisted college. We already did a campus tour. Any feedback on College Park, Lehigh, Drexel engineering?
Most of the schools I was going to suggest (as being more collaborative) have already been mentioned (RPI, WPI, Smith). I would add U of Rochester and Case Western Reserve.
Lehigh is tough for engineering…and there is grade deflation there as well.
For engineering, some schools with insufficient capacity in engineering majors admit to a pre engineering program, where students must compete for admission to their majors. This can be more stressful.
Purdue, Texas A&M, Minnesota, Virginia Tech, Washington (mostly) are examples.
A variant is admission to major, but a progression requirements of a high GPA (up to 3.5) to stay in the major. Wisconsin dies this.
This weed-out system may be part of the reasons for engineering students leaving the major (I.e. they are forced out because their e.g. 3.1 GPA did not pass the admission bar to their majors).
The less stressful counterparts to #17 would be:
A. Enough capacity that engineering majors are not oversubscribed. Typically found at super wealthy super selective schools or less selective schools.
B. Direct admission to major, with no progress requirements besides 2.0 / C grades in the specified courses. But may be more difficult for initial admission, and changing majors may be difficult.
@SyrAlum “Lehigh is tough for engineering…and there is grade deflation there as well.”
That is true. Lehigh Engineering is a lot of work. However, they do have high graduation rates and excellent placement. Also, Lehigh is one of the most flexible colleges in terms of changing majors. For example, if you want to change from Chem E to Mech E or Comp Sci, you only have to be in good standing (not failing) and talk with your advisor and fill out a form. No hurdle gpas or impacted majors.
Also, Lehigh students are collaborative, so if you think of “competitive” is the opposite of collaborative, as some have suggested, then I would say Lehigh is collaborative and not “competitive” in that sense of the word.