Which ECE Program/School: UD honors, UMass honors, UW, MD College Scholars, UVA

I know you say your son loves the UD campus, but have you gone on the EE specific tour? If so, ignore what I’m about to say…

My DS is also going for electrical engineering, and we are from NJ as well. He is very hands-on and always working on some form of engineering project at home. When we toured colleges, he was looking for great facilities, makerspaces, labs, equipment. We managed to tour: NJIT, Lafayette, Drexel, Rowan, TCNJ, and U Delaware before corona hit. I think Delaware may have been the last school we went to. Signed up for the EE specific tour, then the regular campus tour. We turned out to be the only ones on the EE tour, so had a student just show us around the EE building. It was underwhelming to say the least. A small central area for gathering that had some workbenches and some equipment. The room where soldering was taught was cramped and smelled horribly like solder. There was one other room with a decent amount of equipment in it. The student was very nice, but when he described their sohpomore year design project, it was something that my son had already done years ago. The student also said that the IEEE chapter didn’t really do much. He also said there was no other space on campus to work on projects. This all turned my DS off completely, and we left before doing the campus-wide tour.

It’s REALLY hard to pick a school not being able to go inside of labs, classrooms, and makerspaces due to corona. It just sucks. So I just wanted to share our observations, in case you hadn’t done the tour yet.

Good luck with your decision!