Hello, I am a high school student that plans to major in electrical engineering.
So, I would just like to know how the undergraduate engineering department is compared to other schools. I know URoch is a top school, but is its engineering department up to par? Are there a lot of research opportunities? Is the program well known to employers/grad schools? How is the engineering department overall, or the electrical engineering department specifically?
Thank you for any help. I appreciate it.
You can look up rankings but be sure to look at the methodology.
I can also point you toward the ASEE reports on each school. You can search profiles [url=<a href=“http://profiles.asee.org%5Dhere%5B/url”>http://profiles.asee.org]here[/url]. These form the basis of the only non-survey, reliable data (generally) you can find and are used in rankings. (Note I said “generally” because some schools have been caught lying about the number of faculty - including retired, etc. - degrees granted (and when), and I’ll bet more haven’t been caught. Note also that the nature of any of these rankings methodology means a) more research money means higher ranking and b) the rankings are malleable, meaning they’re better seen as very rough groupings than as actual, solidly set lists and 3) the rankings generally reflect that name recognition, however tested, flows with research dollars. And none of these say much about quality of teaching or learning or about what your actual career might look like.)
That said, ASEE collects a lot of data. So for example, the school lists these as its areas of expertise in EE:
Computer systems and microelectronics
Optoelectronics and nanoelectronics
Signal processing and biomedical imaging
Communications
Electromechanics and electrostatics
And you can look at the number of undergrads and grad students in a department, the areas of research and the money available. So for example, UR’s EE department had 134 of the 1543 total engineering students, etc.
@Lergnom Thank you. This site is very useful.
I don’t know about the overall employer opinion of the U of R EE, but my dad got his masters in EE from the U of R and has been very successful since. He owns his own business and is now doing contracting work for the university, 20 years after graduation. To this date he says that the U of R “name recognition” has given him some extra glances that led to opportunities, especially when he entered the workplace after leaving Kodak, who paid for him to attend UR night school.
As for research, one of my friends is an EE major in his Junior year and has gotten to do some pretty cool research for a great professor! And the work that my dad is doing for one of the professors has to do with cancer and it involves a few undergrads and grads too! Overall, I think the UR is pretty focused on research.
Just an end note- this is just my personal opinion/ experience, so I’d rely more on the data sources that @Lergnom provided to make any important decisions.
I just realized that this post is like 20 days old. Whoops! Sorry to bring up the question you already had answered 
What I have been told is that engineering at UR has more of a research focus. Places like RIT, OTOH, have more of a “get a job” focus (can’t think of the right word!) I am sure this is true of many research universities, as compared to “institutes of technology”.
@SoCcErTrAcK2016 The feedback is still appreciated. Thank you!
@MADad Since I believe I would like to go to grad school, would I be better suited toward the research focus of UR than the job focus of a place like RIT?
The answer to that is clearly yes: UR is a widely respected research university. RIT gets almost no research money.
Agree with Lergnom—RIT, with the coop program, is focused on getting you a job, UR engineering would look good applying to grad school.
As an aside, I find it interesting how the conversations about college have changed since the subprime/stock market/world economic collapse. Before that, it was about how much you should pay for “prestige”, with kids and families obsessed over statistically meaningless ranking differences. Now it’s extreme worry about jobs. And the schools that market jobs have been marketing the heck out of that, preying on this insecurity the same way schools preyed on the insecurity about “prestige” schools affecting your future. It gets way, way overblown.
So in context, RIT is a fine place, but it’s essentially a trade school that’s somewhat shifting to be more general. If you go through their catalogue, you can learn how to be a lab tech and that isn’t what a liberal arts college or university teaches (outside of nursing programs/teacher ed programs, etc.) That has apparently become more and more appealing as people worry more and more about getting work. It’s kind of crazy because the areas where jobs are an issue are: a) non-technical fields, as in “you need to find a job with a degree in French Literature”, which is something taught at liberal arts colleges and universities and is more and more part of the curriculum the higher up the prestige scale you move, and b) where you are. If you want to live where there aren’t many jobs, that’s your choice. If you live in Arkansas, the cost of living is lower and salaries are lower than in New Jersey. This is a version of the same argument which the “prestige” nonsense ignored: if you’re in x field, the determinants of what you make are 1) what others in your field make and 2) location. And a corollary is that if your field requires or suggests a graduate degree, what matters most is where that degree comes from - unless it’s a field where having a masters is just a tick in the box to move up in an institution - not your undergrad.