“My n=1, but I’d think being in the engineering biz for nearly 30 years, working for some fortune 50 companies that have purchased start-ups in the Bay area and the Boston area and the test of the East Coast, I’d come across more MIT engineers and Ivy engineers and Stanford engineers, and I’ve not.”
Have heard this from other executives as well. our n=1 is a senior at MIT (materials engineering) who is going on to a PhD program this coming fall. Would MIT see relatively fewer "professional" engineers and relatively more who move on to an academic program of some kind?
My experience matches @BrianBoiler - I have never run into an Ivy League engineer. I had one MIT engineer who ws s a prof of Electrical engineering. So it could be that a lot of them go into academia or do “cool things” in a start up. I know when I was recruiting for a Fortune 5 company we were reluctant to hire from places like MIT because we were not sure we could keep them happy in the often mundane world of day to day engineering. I recall going to Cornell several times to recruit but our company gave up after some time as we perceived the kids were extremely choosy. And we were a company with two Nobel prize medals in our R&D lobby!
@Tiglathpileser My experiences similar to your in some ways. In my 30+ years in tech I’ve only worked with one engineer from MIT. He was both brilliant and fun to work with. During my time interviewing engineers we also avoided elite engineering applicants for most high-volume jobs, however we actively sought them out for other more demanding positions.
Interesting that @websensation ranks CalTech and MIT in the highest (for “smartest”) while Stanford is not in the top 5. Perhaps if you only considered engineering and science Stanford would be in the top few (the techy-fuzzy divide) . My feeling (also) might be wrong because I am biased.
I have something of a bugbear about all this focus on SAT scores. When a school like Caltech, Chicago, or even Stanford (with its handful of merely very smart athletes) has astronomical average SAT or ACT scores, what’s special about them isn’t that they have anything like a monopoly on super-smart kids. What’s special about them is that they choose only to admit and to educate a relatively small number of kids, and thus can limit their students to those with top-.5% stats. The fact that Berkeley or Michigan chooses to educate both people with ultra-high stats and people with merely regular-high stats doesn’t somehow mean that they are not providing adequate education and opportunity to either group. It also doesn’t make them less valuable as institutions. Maybe it makes them more valuable.
People sometimes forget that MIT is also not that large. The big state flagships are graduating 2-3x the number of engineers each year. For less popular majors at MIT, the disparity can be much, much larger. A big chunk of MIT engineering graduates end up in finance. In my little corner of the world, probably 25% went into finance, 20% medicine, 25% academia, 25% engineers - but the vast majority of those went on to advanced degrees and are now at major research institutes. 5% went straight into industry. I’d guess the percentages are different for engineering graduates at other schools, so the relative scarcity doesn’t surprise me.
With the top state flagships, you tend to see “lower” average test scores simply because those institutions have some long-standing and/or mandated commitment to educate their own state residents and, therefore, simply won’t require top scores from that group like they would for OOS. Admission for the latter tends to be much more selective and likely to be on par with many elite privates.
Query: Do the brainy types in STEM, who one would expect to do disproportionally well in the math and related components of the SAT, also do very well (maybe even just as well?) in the verbal and related components? What else would explain why Caltech, the preponderance of whose students will be in STEM, also has the highest scores overall? Perhaps the dirty little secret here, which I as a humanist can admit to, is that the science kids are just overall smarter by every measure than the rest of us. But, then, intelligence ain’t everything either in school or in life.
First I agree intelligence isn’t everything in life. Second, just doing well in the verbal portion is no precursor to being. skilled humanist. As a hard core STEM guy I recall watching some of my skilled writing friends create something out of nothing, a feat I could never accomplish even though our verbal scores were the same. One of my regrets is not having access to a core-like curriculum during my engineering training. The latter half of my career would have benefited more from courses in literature, anthropology and history, to name only 3 humanities subjects
I think the “smarter” you are, the easier it is to figure out how to do well on standardized testing, even testing that is more straightforward and curriculum-oriented than it used to be. There’s probably a high correlation between a scientific mind and one that can figure out the tricks of a test.
@Tiglathpileser , picking up on your point about the limitations of intelligence and a previous exchange about sports, perhaps that is where one can see a beneficial place for the latter in an otherwise fairly austerely intellectual institution like the U of C. When I was growing up sports was always claimed to be character-building. One can scoff at this, and I don’t hear it said much anymore. But there is truth in it. With its egocentricities and distortions of the purely physical, it is also capable of fostering some of the big virtues: discipline, fortitude, loyalty and courage; the lesser virtues of time-management and physical well-being; and the wonderful experience of friendship. Those qualities stand you in good stead whatever the other details of your life. Indeed, they can enhance the scholarly life, where those very qualities are also called for but often found lacking. I’m wondering whether the parents with kids who participate in sports see it in that light.
I would add that most sports teach you about teamwork, and most importantly, how to cope with failure and setbacks. A necessary lesson for many of the “hothouse” kids today…
The influence of standardized testing and of high selectivity enter into all of these discussions. There are widely accepted assumptions surrounding the college admissions process in the continuing search to attract “the best” candidates to a university. Many of these assumptions have been challenged in the world of holistic admissions.
Many traditionalists believe that this is just part of a marketing scheme by some universities. Is it possible that we still have a lot to learn about what makes a winning engineer? Ongoing research in the he behavioral fields of education still have a lot to teach us. Our base of knowledge in this area is continually evolving. Big data is one of the newly evolving areas which holds promise in the broadening our perspectives.
If you don’t hear much about sports building character these days, it’s because you don’t spend any time around sports. The cliche – which I believe to be true, at least to some meaningful extent – is very much alive and kicking. The scandals in the upper reaches of some sports have tarnished it some, but on any given Saturday morning a vast portion of America is trying to build character for the young people among them through sports.
I got a dose of that this past fall. My wife and I and several other people in our community have been working with a family of Honduran refugees. Mainly, I was doing reading tutoring for 9 and 6 year-old girls, and translating for the mother. We decided that it would be great for the girls if they participated in the local intramural soccer league. They are very physical, but had no real outlet for that energy, and no context in which their physical abilities were valued. They also had absolutely no idea of or experience with teamwork. Intramural soccer worked well for them.
You could also say about playing sports that it puts you to a more or less objective test in a world where, if you’re middle class, people are otherwise always putting their fingers on the scale for your benefit. There’s no escaping, fudging or excusing the outcome, good or bad, of your play on the field or the final score of the game.
I booted the odd ground ball when playing infield for the Maroons once upon a time. There’s no place to hide when that happens. One comes face to face with one’s failure if not general inadequacy. But there will always be someone to give you a pat on the bum and tell you to “go get 'em”. You bounce back. Life’s a bit like that.
Both of my children participate in sports - one in club soccer and varsity cross country and now focuses on weight lifting and overall physical health; the other is an equestrian. I believe playing sports has helped both of them improve their self-esteem, leadership skills, social skills, time management, respect, teamwork, etc.
While my husband was working/hiring on Wall St. he looked for young people that played sports in high school and/or college and those that worked in the summers - he wanted team players and those that were willing to work hard to get ahead. Those two things were just as important to him as the name of the school where they earned their degree.
@caymusjordan Agreed. Sports are a very important part of growing up, and I required my daughters to participate in 2 sports per academic year. Interestingly, one of my DD (the most athletic one, recruited as a 1st team all conference field hockey player) went to an interview (6 months before she graduated from college in finance) and was worried that during the interview all the main interviewer talked about was field hockey with her (he had an interest as his own DD played). Needless to say, I told her when an interview goes like that your almost a lock for the job. She was first one offered of about 200 who had applied, and they were hiring 10.
@caymusjordan - Cosign. In my experience, there are few people better suited for the role of investment banking analyst than members of the varsity crew team at an elite university. They have sufficient brains to do the job well, crew practice has conditioned them to work very hard for very long hours without complaint and, given that the sport requires perfect coordination among the eight oarsmen and the cox, they generally understand instinctively how to function within a team.
@marlowe1 About brainy STEM kids: DS is one, and he also does very well in humanities. I think it’s a combination of good reading skills, good logic skills, good imagination, and willpower to become better in areas in which he’s not a natural. Writing essays was a disaster for him in middle school, but with the help of good teachers, parents and hard work he became a good writer, although he’ll probably never be in a profession that requires a lot of writing. But his humanities teachers love when he comes up with an unexpected thought, or notices hidden connections. He’s probably going to Caltech next year, by the way.