Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering or University of Maryland, college park bioengineering with Banniker Key?
No bad choice. Do you want a bigger school like UM or do you want the smaller experience?
If finances aren’t an issue, go to Hopkins. Not to knock MD – it’s a solid school for sure – but with Hopkins you’ll never have to add “But I was an honors student…”
Have you gotten into both? (in which case you don’t have a choice, as JHU is ED). If not, why choose now? Apply and see if you get in first.
You shouldn’t have to add that at the University of Maryland, either, especially in engineering. It’s not just a solid school; it’s an excellent university and one of the top undergraduate engineering schools.
I think there is no bad choice here.
There can be a distinct advantage to being at the top of the pack in the way that you would with the Banneker/Key scholarship. You have an annual reception with the president of the university plus important alumni and donors, which is excellent for networking; Banneker/Key Scholars also participate in select, exclusive service projects and activities. Based on their news, Banneker/Key Scholars are also pretty competitive for national scholarships like the Goldwater, Truman, and Rhodes scholarships and apparently there’s a culture of cultivating students early for these honors.
But there are also advantages to going to elite universities where all of your classmates will be top students, as well.
If you want the better BME program and access to the most impressive professors in the field connected to one of the world’s best medical schools go to JHU. The students in the program are brilliant and if you want to learn alongside students who are near the top of their class at a top university then it’s the place to be.
The B/K is very competitive and unpredictable. How about waiting to see whether you have these two options before deciding.
@juillet Yes, Maryland is a very fine school and it would be a major accomplishment to be accepted into its honors program. But you’d still be at a disadvantage against Hopkins overall. If you ever decided to change fields, perhaps to something outside of engineering, saying you went to Hopkins would do you more good than saying “I was in the honors program at Maryland.” The bias is real and you have to factor that in. Outside of CC, people aren’t as well versed in the ins and outs of admissions and won’t necessarily realize that honors at Maryland may well be more competitive than Hopkins. There may be other reasons to favor MD over JHU (location, social scene, cost), but in terms of prestige JHU is going to win over the long haul, even against honors at MD. If that’s important to the OP, and there isn’t a prohibitive cost differential, why not go with the option that doesn’t need to be asterisked? Rightly or wrongly, people use your undergrad as an instant assessment of your intellectual worth and JHU is pretty unassailable in that regard.
@sheepskin00 Are you a student? Everything you’ve said is ridiculous and untrue. Only other students see undergrad as a measure of a person’s intellect. Not so much in the real world. Adults don’t go around discussing where they went to college. What you do with your education and intelligence is all that matters.
@itsgettingreal17 No, I’m not a student. I’m an adult who has been around the block enough to know that prestige matters in the real world. All else being equal, I will always recommend going to the school whose name will open more doors. It’s 4 years and a lot of money for that degree – why wouldn’t you want it to do as much as possible for you? Generally speaking, if all you knew about 2 job applicants is that one went to JHU and one went to MD, which would you assume was stronger academically (and by extension, intellectually)? I’m not saying it’s always accurate. I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m just saying it’s the reality. Would you advise someone to pass up MIT for MD Honors engineering? If so, I think that’d be bad advice. An honors grad from MD can certainly have excellent opportunities but those opportunties will likely hinge on people understanding s/he was in the honors program whereas an MIT grad gets the benefit of the doubt without that extra info. I’ve seen this over and over throughout my career: people in certain fields/professions use your educational institutions as shorthand for your abilities.
@sheepskin00 You said in your initial post on this site just months ago that you’re a PhD student, so unless you’re on a second career (and ironically argued against prestige), I seriously doubt you’ve been around the block. I’ve worked for several top companies and have been involved in hiring. Prestige only matters, if at all and only for very few fields, for the initial job out of college. After that, no one cares. To say that someone’s degree, and from an excellent flagship like UMD, comes with an asterisk and would disadvantage them compared to a JHU grad, is a really silly thing to say and not grounded in fact.
@itsgettingreal17 First, I thought you were asking if I was a college student. My mistake. Second, I don’t consider myself a “student” any longer as I’m finishing my doctorate, spend my time teaching and researching, haven’t been a “student” in the usual sense in years, and went back to grad school after a long stint in the real world where prestige does matter. Third, the OP is applying to college and will presumably be applying for jobs when s/he graduates and I don’t see why it’s controversial to advise him/her to go for the program that on its face will carry more weight in most scenarios. If prestige doesn’t matter, why even bother applying to anything but the easiest school to get into? Why bother challenging yourself in H.S. if it doesn’t matter whether you get into a “good” college? There are fields where it doesn’t really matter (applying to PhD programs, for example, doesn’t require that you have gone to Harvard, only that you’ve done well wherever you did go). Whatever Maryland’s strengths, it’s not generally seen as a peer of JHU. If there are other factors in MD’s favor, by all means go to MD if it’s a better fit. But if all else is equal, including cost, I don’t think it’s bad advice to recommend JHU here. And I’m actually a big fan of state flagships. I much prefer their students to those coming out of the Ivy League, for example. But the Ivy kids don’t have to worry that an employer won’t realize how strong their undergrad institutions are. It’s just one fewer thing to worry about in the scheme of life.
As someone who, among other things, makes admissions decisions for my graduate program, if I am looking at two applicants from UMD and JHU, the school would play precisely no role in my decision. Those two schools are both great engineering programs and of.thr same tier.
Do not assume money shouldn’t be a part of the equation. Even if one school is marginally better than the other, and I don’t know that one is, you need to consider the opportunity cost of the differential. Let’s say JHU is $100k more, but it’s a “better” school. If you took that money and invested it into a vehicle that returned historically average stock market returns, 7%, you’d have $1,500,000 at age 62. Would you make that much MORE at JHU simply to break even? Probably not.
@sheepskin00 - I work at a household name employer - Microsoft, which hires lots of engineers - and am involved in hiring for my position. I would make no assumptions about which student was stronger academically or intellectually just by looking at their university, nor would I (or do I) prefer one candidate because of where they got their degree.
My own doctoral department had students from a mix of different schools, ranging from public regional universities to Harvard and Yale, but you couldn’t tell the difference between us intellectually on that basis. I have taught many students from a variety of universities (teaching summer classes) and have learned that students vary a lot, especially when you’re comparing among a select group of top universities. Here at Microsoft, we’ve got folks who come from all different kinds of schools. Maryland would be just as welcome here as JHU. We have a lot more UW and Michigan engineers here than we have MIT and JHU engineers. I work with a couple people with no college degree at all.
Would I advise someone to pass up MIT for Maryland honors engineering? It totally depends on the circumstances. If they would have to borrow a lot of money to make MIT work, vs. having a scholarship like the Banneker/Key at Maryland, then yes, I would. If they made it clear that they would enjoy the environment of Maryland more and perhaps thrive more - and have better opportunities - at Maryland because of that, then I would too.
Actually working out in tech/the ‘real world’ has shown me that prestige matters a lot less than I thought, at least in my field. I’m not saying that where you go doesn’t matter at all, but the space between Maryland and JHU is actually a lot smaller than people might think.
“prestige matters in the real world.” - Less so in Engineering (with ABET accreditation) than some other fields. The most important factors to balance when comparing Engineering programs are Fit and Finances.
@Juillet I also work at a household employer that is life sciences/medical devices so more in touch with BME/Bioengineering field and we only fly out candidates for interviews who had top GPAs from top schools (targets). For example, since we are on the east coast, the schools we’re comfortable recruiting from on the west coast are only a handful because it costs about five times to bring one of those candidates out than the ones we can just recruit locally from good regional universities. If I had two candidates with equivalent ECs/GPA and only the option bring one out, I’d pull more for the person who went to the better school. We have people from all over and there’s no discrimination once you’re in the door, however, having the name brand makes it much easier to get through the door. Nowadays your career trajectory is largely shaped by your first job and landing that dream job out of school is much easier with the name brand. The job market is more competitive than when you guys were entering and credentialism is super rampant and only growing.
@colorado_mom Additionally, bioengineering is sort of a field where the program matters a lot more because getting an entry level biomedical engineering job is extremely difficult compared to other typical engineering majors like chemical or mechanical since you need specialization for BME. I wouldn’t even suggest BME if you’re just looking for a major with good career prospects out of school without a graduate degree. Go on the reddit engineering student thread and read all the horror stories about people with BME degrees failing to find jobs even with good GPAs.
Good points about biomed.
I’d imagine that this varies a lot by employer, and also by demand and supply in the respective field. Some employers of course are going to care a lot more about prestige - and this may be more of a factor in biomedicine or biotechnology - and others…won’t. (In ours, we don’t usually take into account the cost of flying people out when deciding which candidates to bring - so whether you’re coming in from San Francisco or Boston, we bring who we want to interview. Other companies do care more, or you may be more likely to be brought in if you’re local.) After your first job or two, of course, where you went to undergrad won’t matter much at all.
I don’t think an engineering major from Maryland would have a problem finding a job after graduation. And even if a JHU graduate had a slightly easier time finding a job at some top employers, I’m not sure it’s worth $200K. Of course, it’s an individual calculation and decision to make, and everyone’s advice is going to be different depending on their personal background and experiences.
@Jsteez - I only entered the job market myself two years ago. I went to graduate school after college, so I delayed entrance into working full-time for quite a while. Plus, I do current hiring, so I see what the current hiring environment is like - but for MY job and for others close to it, of course! Your team and your company’s hiring practices are going to be different, and it sounds like prestige is more important to your team than it is to mine.
But that does spark a question out of curiosity:
If you were interviewing people on the East Coast, does this apply equally there too? You say that you can recruit locally from good regional universities at lower cost, so does that mean that you might bring in someone from, say, Temple or Towson (or Maryland, even) before you bring in someone from Cal Poly SLO or CU-Boulder or UT-Austin?