<p>Hi, I'm Joe from Queens, NY, high school senior, majoring in engineering. I got into RPI for a decent price and but also received full scholarships from Stevens and Maryland College Park.
I'd be happy at all three but I personally prefer Maryland for the extracurricular reasons (beatiful campus, lots of clubs/sports/service opps/more girls than tech schools)</p>
<p>What is the reputation for Maryland's engineering program? I know Stevens and especially RPI are top notch for engineering, but just how good is Maryland? US News ranked it 23rd I believe in their most recent ranking of E-programs.</p>
<p>Would very much appreciate any help! Thanks everyone</p>
<p>For what it is worth, there are PLENTY of Maryland-College Park grads doing crypto work at NSA. Maryland is like #15 in graduate computer science and has the #9 nuclear engineering program.</p>
<p>BTW…not just NSA, but many of the consulting firms that support NSA/FBI/CIA are Maryland grads.</p>
<p>Maryland is a very good program with excellent research and industry connections. RPI and UMD are comparable schools, but UMD is usually regarded as a little better of a school. Both are generally much more well regarded than Stevens. </p>
<p>If you’re interested in research expenditures for engineering:</p>
<p>UMD - $87.9 million (#21 in US)
RPI - $50.1 million (#43 in US)
Stevens - $15.3 million (#117 in US)</p>
<p>…and I would have attended U-Maryland for grad school if their systems engineering program was online. They have others (nuclear, reliability) online but systems engineering is not online (yet) and at the time I wanted to goto grad school, I wanted online courses.</p>
<p>Sort of an unfair criteria, since UMD is meant first and formost as a research institution, while RPI and Stevens are more undergraduate focused.</p>
<p>RPI is a research institution. Stevens is not. Additionally, a better criteria is research spending per student. RPI actually has UMD beat (roughly $6700/student at RPI vs. $2375/student at UMD).</p>
<p>Still, UMD has a bigger national reputation and is a very good school.</p>
<p>Both Stevens at RPI consider themselves research universities and both have research labs on campus, so it is an accurate comparison. It’s also accurate to compare total research expenditures. A school with one student but $1 million in expenditures isn’t going to draw as many companies as a school with 10,000 students and $100 million in expenditures, even though the former has a higher expenditure / student. But if you want the numbers scaled…</p>
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<p>For UMD, you took the Engineering Research Expenditure and divided by the entire student population. Unless the Music Department has some engineering grants I don’t know about, that’s not really fair. Engineering Research Expenditure / Engineering Student at UMD is about $22,000/student.</p>
<p>If you want to look at engineering expenditure / engineering student:</p>
<p>Fair enough, but I stand by my statement that total expenditure isn’t really that fair. A larger school will draw more companies a lot of times, but you can infer that based on school size and don’t really need research expenditure. Normalizing engineering expenditure by engineering students is easily the most useful way to compare research money.</p>
<p>I see your point, it just comes down to what metric to use. </p>
<p>Research expenditure / student is suited to someone that wants to get a rough idea of the amount of research available to students.</p>
<p>Research expenditure as a whole is suited to someone that wants to get a rough idea of how influential a university is in the overall community. </p>
<p>If I’m concerned about undergraduate research opportunities, I’d want to know the first. If I’m interested in job prospects and how well known the university is in academic circles, I’ll look at the second one.</p>
<p>No, research expenditure/student is used as a metric to gauge how much the school is spending overall but normalized by school size. It is a way, in this case, of looking at comparing two schools’ research outputs when the schools are vastly different sizes, as UMD and RPI are. I wasn’t trying to apply it to the undergraduate program. I was using it to address whoever it was that tried to say RPI was a teaching university, not a research university.</p>
<p>It is similar to all those per capita statistics that get released by the census bureau.</p>
<p>I understand that. But look at it this way: Luxembourg has the highest per capita GDP in the world at $80,000 / person. However, who has more influence over world economics: the Luxembourg Minister of Economics or the US Federal Reserve Chairman? The answer is the one that oversees the highest total GDP. </p>
<p>The per capita GDP gives you an idea of the affluence of citizens in the country. The total GDP gives you an idea of the importance of that country to the world economy (and thus the prestige of that country).</p>
<p>Yes but we aren’t talking about the influence these schools have on research, we are talking about the focus each school gives to research, which can be measured by the amount of money spent per student. I think we are arguing different arguments here. All I am saying I that RPI is not a teaching school, as evidenced by their spending per student.</p>
<p>Not sure on the second point. Surely employers don’t have a substantial size bias - and if they do, I’d imagine that they are more selective when looking at the larger school with lower per capita spending.</p>
<p>Who is engineering research usually for? Industry and government. Companies develop relationships with universities. These relationships come to bare both through research expenditures and through the hiring process. So a university that does a lot of research should have a lot of industry connections and a lot of companies that come to that university to hire.</p>
<p>Of course you get some smaller schools with excellent reputations despite a lack of research (Cal Poly SLO, Cooper Union, RHIT, etc.) or that have good industry connections because of location (say Houston, LSU, etc). But if your school is not highly ranked, does not have a prime location, and still does not have a lot of research expenditures, I would be very concerned about it’s industry relationships.</p>
<p>Industry relationships come from more than just research, though. It is every bit as important for your school to have a reputation of producing quality engineers, which is something that is really hard to quantify. It is sort of like the X factor that helps balance out research imbalances between universities. The research relationships definitely help with the industrial connections, but reputation alone also helps just about as much. That is what gives rise to some of those mid-tier schools having a great reputation and hiring profile within their own region while people 3 states away have never even heard of the school.</p>
<p>Good research is a result of industry relationships. If Texas A&M produces good engineers, a company will hire those engineers. If the engineers do well, they move through the management ranks, and the company hires more Texas A&M engineers. When the company needs some research, where do they go? Texas A&M.</p>
<p>Sure, a school could be in the first stage (people hire the engineers but haven’t created the reciprocal relationship), but that’s a transient position. At steady state, the research expenditures are a proxy for industry relationships.</p>