I’m currently a student at Stevens Institute of Technology looking to transfer in the spring to UR. I am a rising sophomore currently looking to major in Electrical or mechanical engineering and at UR hopefully double major in music.
Im already sold on the school but I’m going to have to justify my move to a lot of people so any imformation will help.
Well, I looked at the ASEE college profiles for each school. I see that Stevens has almost 2300 engineering undergrads and received a total of about $12M in external funding in 2014. UR has about 240 engineering undergrads and received a total (not including the laser energetics lab, which receives mega dollars of over $63M) of $24M. Even if I take out the engineering department’s own optics funding, which isn’t fair (because it is so highly ranked), UR’s total is about $16M. Think of the difference in research opportunity.
Well, to “justify” your move to “a lot of people” probably means being prepared with as many justifications as possible, to have some comment that will satisfy each person (keep in mind you can’t please everyone though, and the most important thing is your happiness).
First, you need to be sure that it will be a better fit for you, and I hope you’ve done your homework there and visited UR, etc. So make a list comparing the schools and include everything below and anything else you can think of:
location - why Rochester is better for you than across from NYC
majors - why UR gives you better chance to also study music than Stevens (confirm they allow engineering majors to have a double major, because at most places they can’t even fit in a minor)
cost - why cost of UR is better (or if it’s more expensive, why it’s worth it)
people - why the students at UR will be a better fit for you (gender, number, diversity in majors/other, percent full-time/Greek/athletic/living on campus, etc.)
extracurricular activities - why the clubs, sports, etc. are better for you at UR than Stevens
campus - why the campus is better for you
housing - why the housing choices are better for
dining - why dining options are better for you
weather - why the weather and more snow are better for you (snow sports/festivals/beauty…)
off-campus activities - why you’d rather be in Rochester than NYC metro
spectator sports - why UR is better
research opportunities, study abroad opportunities, etc. - why UR is better
religious opportunities, honors programs, minors, etc. - why all the other factors are better for you at UR
This is easy.
I’ve said this before, but Stevens EE curriculum looks awful. They teach the courses their faculty know how to teach, not the courses that you need to be an EE. They make you take too many courses outside of EE (Mechanics of Solids, Thermo, Materials, Graphics) and their EE courses don’t cover E&M at all except for the Physics sequence. Many required courses would be electives at most schools.
http://www.stevens.edu/ses/ece/undergrad/curriculum
vs
http://www.ece.rochester.edu/major-minor/major_ece.html
Rochester is a much better school and the flexibility in the curriculum allows far more choice. Make sure the courses that you are taking now are ones required by the EE curriculum (or ME if that’s what you prefer). I’m an EE so I can only speak to that curriculum.
I think how much justification you need to provide depends on who is paying for your education. Since you need to justify the move to a lot of people, can we assume that you are being financed by others?
Assuming that’s the case, and you are NOT getting tuition relief from SIT, then the costs are about the same. In this case, your desire to double major in music should be all the justification that is needed.
If you are being financed by others and you ARE getting more aid from SIT than you would from UR, then it’s a tough sell; you need to convince your benefactors to kick in more money so that you can pursue your interest in music as well as engineering.
If you are paying for your education yourself, then you don’t need the approval of others.
Dear Rocker,
I strongly disagree with you. Firstly, Stevens faculty do not teach “only the courses they know about”. Stevens has faculty who are experts in all the major areas of electrical engineering. Stevens’ EE curriculum is not lacking in any respect compared to Rochester or any other school. Your comment displays your lack of knowledge regarding Stevens. Stevens has, like all other ABET accredited schools of engineering, courses in the electrical engineering aspects of electromagnetic fields and waves. The first semester Physics E/M course covers all of the basic E/M theory that is required in electrical engineering, including analysis using Maxwell’s equations in their integral form and derivations of the laws of E/M that they create. The circuit analysis course sequence in the EE curriculum covers the applied aspects of E/M theory as they apply to deriving the basic laws of engineering circuit analysis. This material comprises the standard E/M coursework required in the EE curriculum. The EE curriculum provides significant flexibility for electives. There are more advanced undergraduate and graduate E/M courses in the EE department, and students can take them. With respect to the great breadth and depth of coursework outside the specific EE major required of Stevens engineers, that is the great strength of Stevens’ curriculum compared to the vast majority of other schools including Rochester’s. Stevens upholds the vision of its founder in 1870 that an engineer should be “liberally/technically” educated and have a well-rounded exposure to all the current fields of engineering not only one’s specific major. I worked with the world’s leading research center in the telecommunications industry, which had many Stevens graduates on their staff. The ability for the graduates to solve problems of an interdisciplinary nature and their success in doing so was, and is, far and above graduates of what I call “engineering trade schools” (that is, schools that delve deeply into a narrow specialty and not provide a well-rounded education that allows the graduates to connect the various engineering disciplines that comprise any engineered project or product). Stevens is what I call an “engineering academy”. 152 credits are required for the B.E. degree, which reflects the great depth and breadth that the students undergo, and are well conversant in all fields of engineering not only their major or specialty. For many years, Stevens had no undergraduate “majors”, but rather Concentrations in the specialty added to the broad-based curriculum, which is Stevens’ great strength and sets the students apart and makes them far more desirable to employers than many others. Do you really believe that an EE should not take Strength of Materials, Thermodynamics, Solid State Materials, Fluid Mechanics, Chemical Engineering processes, Graphics, Computer Programming/languages, and the many other courses that make that person an effective problem solver? I strongly disagree with you if you don’t.
Rochester is a good school, but it isn’t Stevens. Stevens students are the third highest paid college graduates, and have the tenth highest return on investment of tuition of all institutions in America for a very good reason (source, Bloomberg Business Week/Payscale, "What’s Your College Degree Worth, 2015). This is higher than Rochester, MIT, all the state universities, and all the Ivy League institutions (and the highest here in New Jersey). It is because they are the most effective problem solvers of any institution extant.
The other commenter who was quoting the volume of sponsored research has obsolete information. Stevens’ externally funded research was $33 million in 2015. This is exclusive of the three Federal Government funded research centers at Stevens, which garnered $60 million in funding.
I attended two other universities in my career after Stevens (one of them was a well known engineering institute in New England). My preparation at Stevens was the equal of all of them. Given the extremely high level of rigor at Stevens, those others were no sweat at all.
Michael, Ph.D., SM IEEE, Stevens '80
I do agree Stevens is an excellent school but it is coop school which is a work focused type of curriculum and since it is located in the NYC area, that makes finding jobs/coop easier. My son interviewed at Stevens and working in NYC was a real draw.
As I understand it, the negative of Stevens is that it is a much smaller school, many of the professors are part time and like all STEM schools, lacks a balanced number of women and men.
UR tends to groom students for Grad school and research more than getting a job. So it will never be able to compete with graduates getting high salary jobs upon graduation. Stevens is STEM school so over 80% of their degrees are in fields that are higher paid. That does skew the statistics.
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors
Rochester is also not NYC when it comes to finding local internships. RIT is a coop school in Rochester and has been gathering their connections for students for many years (they have always been a tech school) and until recently, they were on the quarter system which is better suited for coops.
Lakemom,
That statement about “work focused curriculum” is the furthest from the truth. Firstly, engineering is a profession in which science is applied to solve practical problems requiring the use of technology to the betterment of society. As such, engineering is an applied endeavor. All engineering schools teach the student the principles and practice of engineering, as is required by all practicing engineers. The vast majority of engineering students attend engineering school with the intention of working in engineering and/or studying engineering further in graduate school after they graduate. All engineering schools have “work focused curricula” to a certain extent. The engineering accrediting agency (ABET) requires specific courses to be taught in both the underlying theoretical science and the applied science and engineering courses that train the student to use scientific principles to solve engineering problems. This results in the engineering curricula in all accredited schools containing a common set of core courses (required by all engineering disciplines) and a set of applied courses (discipline-specific). If you read the engineering curriculum of Stevens, Rochester, or any other ABET-accredited school you will necessarily find much commonality of specific subjects. Medical and law students study “work focused curricula” for example, since they attend those schools with the intention of working in the medical and law fields and therefore require specific courses to train them to do the work. That said, Stevens’ science base is far deeper than many schools and exceeds the ABET minimum requirements by a large margin. Stevens students are as well prepared for graduate school and research as, or better than, graduates of any school in the United States. Stevens is in the top 100 of schools from which undergraduates eventually go on to earn their doctorates in engineering and science. There are/were at least a half a dozen MIT professors that I know of who graduated from Stevens for example. Stevens is the anthesis of the “engineering trade school” I mentioned in my previous post. As I say, the 152 credits required for the B.E. (undergraduate engineering) degree is the most of any US university, and many of those credits are in the fundamental theoretical science and the depth engineering courses that many school do not require. As a result, and I reiterate - Stevens students are superior interdisciplinary problem solvers as well as natural candidates for graduate school. Last year, 17% of Stevens graduates intended full time graduate or professional study. Many more pursue their Master’s degree part time while working full time. Over 60% of Stevens alumni hold a graduate or professional degree.
In my graduating class we had graduates who were accepted to the graduate schools of MIT, NYU, Harvard, U of Chicago, Yale, RPI, Stanford, Princeton, and many other leading schools. You won’t see that in a school that is primarily vocationally centered as you assert.
The Payscale survey also compared engineering schools’ alumni salaries with the engineering schools of larger universities, which removes the skewing of statistics you mentioned. In that comparison Stevens came in at fifth in the United States, so, even among its engineering peers, the superior problem solving ability of Stevens graduates is apparent.
Most of Stevens’ faculty are full time. Most classes are taught by the full-time faculty. Most engineering schools have adjunct faculty who are recruited for their industrial and professional experience. In engineering, as I am sure you would agree, it is of great benefit to the students to have leading practicioners who have designed successful products, public works, systems, medical devices, and all the other fruits of engineering as teachers. They bring the practical realities of the world into the classroom. When I was taking my master’s degree at Stevens, the graduate compiler (computer operating system) course in computer science was taught by the (then) head of Computer Science Research at Bell Laboratories. He was one of the renowned experts in the field and wrote several standard textbooks in the subject. He was a part time Stevens professor - do you think he wasn’t an eminently qualified choice?
When I attended Stevens 7% of the undergraduate student body was female. It is about 27% now. Yes you are correct, science and technology is a male dominated field (though it’s getting less so today). I would venture that the engineering classes at Rochester are also mostly male. I always advise students to attend a school for the quality and rigor of the academics, areas in which Stevens excels. One has time to date when they finish college. The male/female ratio is an intangible. It’s not going to make or break one’s college experience.
Stevens has a total undergraduate and graduate student body of 5900, about the size of Rochester’s undergraduate class. Yes, Stevens is small in size but huge in impact. Small is a virtue. The professors know the students’ names and have far more one-on-one interaction with the students than most large universities. Class discussions in a class of 20 are going to be far more productive and enriching than in a lecture hall of 150. You’re seriously mistaken if you think that small by itself is a negative. It’s the quality of the academics and the opportunities that they afford that count, not the size.
The New York Metropolitan area is the capital of practically all industries you can imagine. Stevens co-op students get placements in the largest and leading firms in the technology, finance, manufacturing, government, and even arts sectors. You won’t get those opportunities in Rochester. What is in Rochester? Kodak? Kodak is a shell of what it once was, unfortunately. Your son was correct in recognizing that the location - the best of any school in the country - is a huge advantage in building one’s career as a student.
Incidentally, the student who wanted to transfer to Rochester because of the availability of a dual engineering and music major should seriously consider remaining at Stevens. The superiority of the engineering program notwithstanding, Stevens has a unique Music Technology program, from which students have been placed with major media and arts companies and institutions. What is noteworthy is that the graduates of this program - with the B.A. degree (Stevens did not even offer a B.A. degree until about 15 years ago) - all achieved positions in the music industry or graduate school admissions in music. One graduate I know of was accepted to Julliard. I am certain that given the interest and drive, he/she could arrange a double major in music. The music faculty are highly accomplished. A double major of engineering and anything else is going to be hard at any school, given the workload and high number of required courses in engineering, but again given the drive and ability anything is possible.
I am not an engineer so I cannot comment much about what you say about the students you graduated with nor the stats you have handy 
What I meant by a “work focused curriculum” is that it is a coop school, like Drexel (which I think is Steven’s biggest Competitor) or Northeastern. RIT is a coop school but Rochester is not a city like NY, Phil. or Boston. I don’t know where all they send those students to do coops.
According to this link, 61% of Stevens Profs are full time.
http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/stevens-institute-of-technology/academic-life/faculty-composition/
95% of UR’s are:
http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-rochester/academic-life/faculty-composition/
And I don’t think you can really compare Stevens music program to that of Eastman. It depends on what a student wants out of their music education. But I since I know the engineering curriculum of ME at UR, I can tell you that double majoring in Engineering and Music is quite doable due to the "open"curriculum UR has.
Sounds like you had a great education at Stevens, not sure how many years ago that was and what your current relationship is with the school. Fortunately, both schools exist and provide excellent educations.
Not sure how RIT got into the conversation, but I can offer a bit of insight on the breadth of the co-op program placement. My daughter (not in engineering) already has a co-op for Summer 2016 in Wisconsin, and declined a co-op in Minneapolis. Her friends have had co-ops in Boston, NYC, Chicago, DC, Kansas City, Raleigh, and California.
Stevens is a co-op school. RIT is also a Co-op school and is 20 min from UR so both are in Rochester. Thats how RIT was mentioned. Other than that, the 2 schools are not alike.
Co-op schools are different than non-co-op ones as they typically have a student go longer than 4 years and working at 1, 2 or 3 work settings is integral to the program.
I do understand co-op programs (as I mentioned, my daughter does go to RIT), but the OP never expressed an interest in RIT - that’s why I was confused as to its inclusion in the discussion. You just seemed to express some uncertainty over the geographic reach of RIT’s co-op program, which I don’t see as any problem at all.
My daughter does love RIT, and has explored Rochester quite a bit. She has made some acquaintances from UR, and says the campus is beautiful. I hope to get over there someday to check it out!
Ah, I missed that your daughter went to RIT in your first sentence. Now I see how they place their students.