<p>Cornell offers a large, highly regarded, comprehensive engineering program within a highly regarded university, in a beautiful setting within a college town in upstate New York.</p>
<p>Engineering students at Cornell are offered a large breadth and depth of courses in the broad array of engineering disciplines, from which they can optimize and choose their path. At Cornell, you will not be funneled into certain areas or engineeering subspeciallties due to limitations of offerings at your college. Cornell offers an engineering coop program in which engineering students can get “real world” work experience, to help inform their subsequent path and course selection.</p>
<p>Some Ivy League engineering programs seem to appeal largely to people who from the outset don’t really want to be engineers. (Why they are spending their irreplacable undergraduate years leaning engineering, then, would be a question, but whatever…). At Cornell there are diverse objectives and paths realized in the end, but a considerable number of people there actually do intend to go into the field, in some capacity, for some amount of time at least. Because they are known to produce a lot of smart graduates who actually want to practice engineering, the college is well recruited by the major engineering firms.</p>
<p>Among a number of highly reputed engineering colleges, everything else associated with the college experience may be more different than the actual core engineering programs themselves are. At Cornell, the resources of a great research university are available for choosing elective courses outside of engineering. The course choices available to you outside of engineering are huge. Courses in humanities, etc, will be populated, in part, by highly motivated and intelligent students who are studying in these areas for their major, not a lark.</p>
<p>Cornell engineering’s retention rate is undoubtedly far higher than average for an engineering college. However, even at Cornell there are some engineering students who find that engineering is not their cup of tea. Although transfer between colleges is not automatic or guaranteed, as a practical matter many of these people are in fact able to transfer to other colleges within the university. So this is possible, as a contingency to reduce that concern somewhat.</p>
<p>Socially, Cornell overall is about 50-50 Male-Female, and that is the experience in the dorms. Also in the dorms you will be in the company of a highly diverse group of students, attending all the various colleges, with diverse outlooks and objectives. It offers intercollegiate and intramural sports, fraternities for those who like that, a convenient area right off-campus (Collegetown) for ready diversion. Yet it is a highly academic school, much serious scholarship takes place there.</p>
<p>So that’s the deal.</p>
<p>Whether you should pick it, that’s up to you.</p>