<p>Are there any benefits of attending a prestigious college for someone who wants to do engineering? Is there a notable difference in salary?</p>
<p>In anything other than a first job - the differences are very marginal.</p>
<p>It usually helps a lot getting a great first job. The name recognition doesn't guarantee but may differentiate you in term of advancement, promotion etc. </p>
<p>Depend on your location and industry, the alumni network is often far more helpful than anything else.</p>
<p>You can enjoy the wows you get from people when you tell them your major and what school you go to.</p>
<p>Fusion, can you please respond to my private message?</p>
<p>If your going straight into an engineering field, I dont think it matters. But if you wanted to branch out into something like consulting, finance, or something else engineers sometimes get involved in, I think a top school is a big plus. At Berkeley, a lot of people get hired by Ibanks and consulting firms, that only recruit at top schools. If your only interested in being a traditional engineer at a company, then it probably wont make a difference.</p>
<p>Also when you attend a top school, you are around the best and the brightest, which can help your development quite a bit.</p>
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Also when you attend a top school, you are around the best and the brightest, which can help your development quite a bit.
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Other than trying harder for the same grades (and therefore learning the material better), I doubt this has any measurable effect.</p>
<p>If your smart and motivated, you can also get into research that is cutting edge and gets lots of recognition. Think about how cool it would be to say you were involved in research that won a nobel prize, or that led to some significant discovery.</p>
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Also when you attend a top school, you are around the best and the brightest, which can help your development quite a bit. </p>
<p>Other than trying harder for the same grades (and therefore learning the material better), I doubt this has any measurable effect
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</p>
<p>I believe it can help immensely in terms of the networking. Success often comes not from what you know, but WHO you know. For example, many of the early employees at Google (who are now multimillionaires) happened to be buddies of Brin and Page at Stanford. If they had never gone to Stanford, they would never have met Brin/Page and the Google project, and they wouldn't be rich now.</p>
<p>I believe networking is most important if you want get into a tech startup. The truth is, startups don't really do any formal hiring, because they don't have the expertise to do it and rarely have the resources for it anyway. Instead, when the company is still at the startup phase, who ends up getting hired are almost inevitably the friends and friends-of-friends of the founders. So if you can't play a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with one of the founders, you're not going to get hired.</p>
<p>"Also when you attend a top school, you are around the best and the brightest, which can help your development quite a bit."</p>
<p>I second that. The place I am at now has stretched and forced me to work like no place else. I know the types of people who go to mid-tier state schools (even some lower-top tier state schools) these people are usually not so motivated and don't see school as a playing an important part in their lives.</p>
<p>The thing that made me fall in love with Rice was when I visited my friend's differential equations class when I was a senior in high school. The prof was lecturing at the front of the room, and was doing some stuff in MATLAB. She typed in a few lines of code, said, "And look what happens when we graph this!"</p>
<p>She went "click!"</p>
<p>MATLAB went <em>GRAPH</em></p>
<p>The whole class breathlessly went "Wooooooooaaaaahhhhh....!!!"</p>
<p>And <em>I</em> went, "I must go here..."</p>
<p>There's something about awestruck reactions over something as eye-gougingly mundane as differential equations that is, in fact, ridiculously contagious, and it really motivates you like nothing else. Colleagues like that <em>force</em> you to see the beauty in what you're learning, and that gives you passion about what you do, which makes you incredibly appealing to employers, among other more obvious personal-fulfillment sorts of things.</p>
<p>I feel the same way at Berkeley. People here generally love what they do, and aren't just going to college because they have to. It makes you interested in what your learning also. Plus lots of really interesting speakers come. Like a couple weeks ago the president of Chile (from 2000-2006) came to talk about a latin america.</p>
<p>THERE ARE NO BENEFITS</p>
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I believe it can help immensely in terms of the networking.
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I'll agree with that. I took the quoted statement as more of an academic development thing. However, it should still be prefaced that working for a startup is a fairly low probability event even if you go to a prestigious university and certainly should not govern the decision of where to go.</p>
<p>Well obviously there would be benefits for someone who goes to MIT compared to a lower tier state school, its just a matter of how much.</p>
<p>How much you ask?...not much....check this out...</p>
<p>Relying solely on a person's salary is a stupid way of measuring the benefits of going to a top school.</p>
<p>The purpose of that article was to educate parents to NOT be put in a bind just to send your kid to some "name" school.</p>
<p>From the stats I've seen, your starting salary is slightly higher than the national average, almost insignificant (like 2k). But as people have mentioned, networking and career opportunities. I went to a smaller engineering program for my undergrad and had a hard time even getting noticed by major companies in my field (submit your resume online = don't hold your breath). But once I got to a more prestigious grad program, I was able to get interviews or at least make contact with those same companies just by going to the career fair and making use of the career tools available.</p>