<p>I mean I think we can all agree MIT, Brown, and Duke are top most schools in America. They all have the name brand and amazing education.
But why is MIT better than Brown and Duke for engineering? Do they have better teachers? Better internship opportunities? Those don't seem right...you'd think the best of the best teachers exist in MIT, Brown, and Duke...</p>
<p>^ MIT is the top engineering school in the country. If I had to pick the top three schools for engineering, it would be MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley. You can simply visit the websites of the schools you’ve listed and compare depth of faculty, breadth of fields and coursework, and the undergraduate research opportunities offered by each.</p>
<p>That doesn’t seem to be right…I mean math is math and optical physics&electronics is optical physics&electronics.</p>
<p>How could a professor in MIT teach an engineering course better than a professor at Brown? They have to be of similar caliber in teaching…</p>
<p>Math is NOT math. There are many different areas of math and not all schools offer the same breadth and depth of classes. Just compare the number and type of math courses offered at MIT and at Brown and Duke and you’ll see the difference. Look at the amount of math research and new publications in math generated by MIT professors vs. Brown or Duke.</p>
<p>Brown’s and Duke’s reputations came about because of the excellence of their liberal arts education, not their engineering expertise.</p>
<p>It’s not just the teaching.</p>
<p>MIT has better brand recognition for engineering, more famous professors do better research, better labs, better undergraduate research opportunities, and more funding for engineering projects/programs. Just to name a couple :D</p>
<p>While MIT is famous for being a fire hose, in general you will receive relatively the same academic preparation from say the top 30 schools in the country nut its the environment surrounding those academic that makes the difference.</p>
<p>Why do people choose Harvard over say Tulane?</p>
<p>What makes engineering better at MIT?>>>The engineers, of course. It’s really the concentration of brilliant Math minds per square inch-when I was at Bates, we used to party and argue politics for fun. In my husband’s dorm at MIT, they would discuss how they had modified their home-made lasers. And play bridge and count cards, of course…There’s smart…and then there is MIT smart.</p>
<p>Because they offer breadth and diversity. Amazing research. Much better recruiting. And most of all, some of the best engineering students of your generation working alongside you.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This isn’t why MIT is considered a better place to study engineering. Why is ANY school considered “better” in a certain area? It’s usually because of the concentration of interesting work going on in that area, along with consideration of the number of superstars. </p>
<p>Go up into the specialized world and you realize people don’t know very much about each others’ research beyond a certain point. The concentration of people getting in depth into different aspects of different fields is actually really easily judged just because of how obvious it is when you talk to certain faculty and they know monumentally more about some things than other things. </p>
<p>This basically means that you’re just going to find an insanely larger number of people at MIT who are skilled at thinking about engineering, whether you’re talking students or faculty, than at almost any other place around. </p>
<p>Contrary to what you may believe, any smart engineering professor CANNOT teach a good course in any area of engineering. It takes a lot of expertise to teach an entire semester’s worth of material when it isn’t necessarily streamlined stuff (like teaching calculus out of the zillion textbooks). Ditto for running research. </p>
<p>People can know how to quote the “sound smart” things from Wikipedia or your favorite engineering textbook, but that doesn’t mean they know how to actually teach someone how to really think about a subject properly.</p>
<p>Duke and especially Brown do not have a sufficient number of engineering students to support the number and diversity of classes that MIT has.</p>
<p>Duke has an excellent biomedical engineering program, and engineering there is slanted toward this. </p>
<p>I have a feeling that Brown engineering is populated by pre-meds with a quantitative bent who want a taste of engineering.</p>
<p>You get out of any college only what you put into it. Old saying but true. So, if you don’t put a lot into it, you’ll get just as good an education from the community college down the street as you would MIT. HOWEVER, there are many more opportunities at MIT for research, for going above and beyond the normal classroom work with a bunch of amazing professors, working with fellow students that are also amazing, etc. So if you want to get the most out of an MIT education, prepare to work. Assuming that you like what you do (and if you don’t, why are you doing it?), it won’t seem like work; just having fun. </p>
<p>I did some undergraduate research on a NASA contract under the guidance of a professor that had just returned to campus after being chief scientist for the Air Force. Had a poly sci class with a professor that was taking a break from being a major political campaign manager in Washington DC (who had a great list of guest lecturers come in). My econ professor became an economic advisor to the president later in his career. Had freshman physics from the about to retire head of the physics department who had a significant role in the Manhatten project during WW2 (and who opened the floor of his lectures on Friday to let the students ask any question as long as it had “something” to do with physics; and what doesn’t have “something” to do with physics).</p>
<p>You get the picture.</p>
<p>And having graduated from MIT over 30 years ago, I can tell you that just saying you graduated from there opens up many doors. It is almost embarassing at times; almost!!!</p>
<p>It’s not just the professors: it’s the intense culture of exploration and creation.</p>
<p>For example:</p>
<ul>
<li>We have an IAP class called MASLAB, where students just come in and build a completely autonomous robot, from the ground up (hardware software etc… combo)</li>
<li>Battlecode: coding competition during IAP.</li>
</ul>
<p>I suppose I might be too late on this subject, but I didn’t catch in time because I was actually away for the weekend visiting a friend who is an engineering major at Brown, so it feels appropriate to chime in.</p>
<p>Obviously I do not have first hand experience, but from what I know about my friend’s coursework and opportunities, I would not hesitate to say that he is getting an excellent education in engineering there. </p>
<p>What’s important to note is that the atmospheres at the two schools could probably not be more different. MIT is a firehose, and Brown is extraordinarily laid back. </p>
<p>Obviously MIT has advantages in engineering. I would say the biggest one is the fact that it is an engineering SCHOOL, so most of the students are engineers, the engineering department is much larger and more varied than at Brown, the research opportunities are also more varied, and the engineering culture invades the whole school.</p>
<p>But if you like Brown, I see no reason NOT to go there for engineering. (I know nothing about Duke.)</p>