@IWannaHelp. Look at the second link. The Barger Leadership Institute was a $10,000 grant to research and do analysis. They were studying if an tech group on AR /VR was viable. They also got $5,000 from https://www.optimizemi.org/
They conducted many interviews with professors, companies, students and alumni. They have one of the well attended groups on campus with weekly meetings, lectures and workshops. University of Michigan just implemented a multimillion dollar initiative for the University and they are bringing them in for consult. They have lectured to graduate students also.
It’s not scientific research for curing cancer buts it’s still data research using research principles.
My son put on the first Midwest conference for this technology last year at Michigan which was well attended.
My daughter at her small Lacs did research for theaters and analysis of the audience (forgot the reason) and was in the Chicago Tribune and has done research on an island in Indonesia…
My common sense tells me provosts in general don’t have any insight on how much other schools fund their undergraduate research. To me, it’s obvious but of course, you are free to treat USN like the Bible. But let’s just take a look at one example. USN put Elon at #4. According to its 2019/2020 factbook, 23% of the seniors participated in research. For Northwestern, that percentage was 58% yet USN put it at #34. By the way, USN put Michigan 4 spots behind Emory in the overall college ranking. I wouldn’t put that much faith in USN if I were you.
As for NSF data, the expenditures are gonna be larger for many public schools simply because of their sheer size. They are funds for faculty research. There is no evidence those numbers translate directly to undergraduate research experience. In fact, if those sheer numbers were indicative of the quality of undergraduate research, private schools probably wouldn’t have dominated external scholarships like Rhodes, Marshall, Goldwater, Fulbridght…etc.
@Knowsstuff@momofsenior1 “With all due respect your not getting good advice. Naviance doesn’t take into account engineering which is always higher”
Naviance also doesn’t take into account gender and major and female applying to engineering with those stats does mean that the safeties are in fact safeties, esp OSU. UM and Purdue would be matches. Anyway she got in NU ED, but do you know any females that got rejected for STEM with that strong an application? Anecdotally, I don’t.
@theloniusmonk - every cycle I see females in STEM rejected from Cornell with stats like this. I have to assume other competitive schools are also rejecting them. FWIW UM wait listed all engineering applicants from my D’s year, male and female. These were the highest stat students in the school.
Yes I have. No question. Every year from Michigan and other schools. Naviance will just give a clue. Not an absolute. So many students look at Naviance and think if they hit the matrix then their in. We all know that’s not the case. It doesn’t include engineering as you stated but a student can go further and ask the school if they know how many got in to X school for engineering. Some schools have that data.
Anyway… Glad to hear the OP is happy with her choice of schools.
I realize this is basically resurrecting the dead, but FWIW based on my experience I’m not so sure about this from post #3:
“Compared to schools like Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia: more practical bent on engineering: I feel curriculum is better designed towards workplace, as opposed to assuming that everyone wants to head to the PhD program.”
with respect to Cornell.
As for curricula being better designed towards workplace, I can’t say. But I know back when I attended at least the upper level programs of Cornell’s engineering college could be, and most often were, steered in that direction.
And most of its grads became working engineers, not PhD students.
When I attended, Cornell had a very active Master of Engineering program, geared specifically to students who planned to practice in industry. Virtually all the courses available to Master of Engineering students were also available to advanced undergraduates. The ones I took all had labs with practical-oriented projects. While it was it thought to be the case that only a minority of students at Princeton and Columbia actually became working engineers, that was certainly not the case at Cornell.
Actually I’d be curious as to what proportion of Northwestern engineering students actually become working engineers. Because I worked at a large engineering firm in Chicago, and I can’t recall a single engineer there from Northwestern. Some people got executive MBAs from there, but no undergrad engineer hires that I can think of. The largest cohort of the engineers there came from UIUC.
OP here… I totally agree. This is also based on my anecdotal evidence from knowing many, many top female STEM applicants.
Considering that all the “safety” schools to which she applied did award her the very highest level of merit aid they had available for a student (e.g. full tuition), I still believe they were in fact true “safeties.” So glad she didn’t spend many more hours applying to “safer safeties.” That would have been a complete waste of time.
Interesting… My daughter really loved her Cornell visit. She was really torn between NU and Cornell Engineering. Cornell has a beautiful campus, and she really loved the music library there too.
I do think a large number of NU students become practicing engineers (and also Dr’s, lawyers, investment bankers, business execs, etc), however there are just so many more UIUC engineering grads in the area. UIUC engineering is large.
My daughter liked UIUC, but didn’t want to have to freshman commit to a specific major, which seems necessary at UIUC to assure a place in the program. She was accepted into UIUC honors chemical engineering but that program is in a school separate from the main UIUC engineering school, which also seems problematic if she wanted to, say, switch to mechanical engineering.
NU has no such issues. She can easily take cross dept. courses or switch majors. Maybe she’ll be a practicing professional engineer, or maybe she’ll use the degree as a stepping stone to something else. She likes the opportunities and flexibility NU provides.
She just found out there is a new joint Kellogg MBA/McCormick Engineering degree. She was considering adding the Kellogg certificate, but now is thinking about this new dual degree program. Seems like a great opportunity for students.
As a parent of a freshmen non-recruited male hockey player in the CoE at OSU (in state), I can weigh in on a few things. My detailed oriented son picked apart all of the engineering programs at colleges you mentioned. He also amazingly listened to a couple of people we happened to know who hire a lot of engineers. The spreadsheet he created kind of drove me nuts because it was all about concrete student outcomes and not at all about fit, which he claimed did not matter to him. Keep that in mind.
Size matters in engineering. A deal-breaker for my S20 was anything which smacked of his having a difficult job search after 4 (5?) years in college. As a very serious student, and an introvert, the thought of needing to do a protracted job search was akin to drinking broken glass. So he researched the career centers and the number of companies who recruited on campus for engineers. That eliminated a lot of colleges from his list. The big flagships trounced (with exceptions of schools like MIT) most other schools in this regard.
He was all-in for engineering. Different than your daughter. Any college which had a flexible engineering program lost points. He liked a clear path and curriculum to being work-ready. He expected the college to know what it is doing and to tell him what be needed to be a strong engineer. We walked out of more than one CoE presentation which emphasized lots of course flexibility. Yes, he is weird.
OSU’s CoE is one of the biggest in the country. Engineering grows in popularity every year, everywhere. My kid was high stats and was lucky enough to get in EA to OSU first round of acceptances, but he was the only one of 10 kids at his HS in his stats range to do so (no clue why). Of those 10 kids, 2 were wait-listed (totally mystery why). One of his best friends from elementary school moved out of state and didn’t get in to OSU until the very last round of acceptances and he was a stronger candidate than my son. Another OOS friend was rejected early. In sum, acceptance into the engineering program felt a bit like a roll of the dice. His advisor in HS warned us early that he ‘should get in’ but engineering is always a crap shoot. The odds are extremely good for your daughter, but not 100%. No tragedy if she doesn’t get accepted at any specific school, but expect it for a least one and it will make you scratch your head.
COVID. This year’s cycle will be highly impacted by COVID situation. I haven’t seen the final numbers for the current freshmen class in the COE at OSU, but being such a cost effective option for instate kids, the economic situation will work in the favor of all state flagships this year. Those who can or are willing to pay more will be smaller in number. More of those who have the option to pay so little will take it. Since you are full-pay (so were we), this will work in your favor at the private schools.
Hockey. Will NU even have enough girls who can skate to form a club team?
MIT is a very different story for hockey for her. My son ruled out any school which didn’t have at least intramural hockey. My older son played intramural hockey at OSU and felt the competition was as strong as his high school competition (state champs). He lived in Chicago for a few years after graduation and was very disappointed in the options for adult leagues. MIT is surrounded by colleges with lots of girls who play hockey. Evanston?
A hiring manager in engineering told my S20 to go to a state flagship (for lots of reasons). Since my son had the option of a strong instate flagship, this eliminated all other state schools for him, with the exceptions of UCLA and GT.
Through the very practical lens my son used, which is clearly a different lens than your daughter’s, he eliminated all but two schools - OSU and Cornell. UCLA and GT hovered as a potential third choice but were also huge reaches. His safeties were other Ohio state schools, but no other apps were necessary since he was accepted in early November to OSU.
I am a statistician by training and I assess risk for a living. All you can do is minimize her risk in balance with what she wants. Since $ is not an issue, the risk of a failure here is very, very small. Don’t make decisions based solely on the fear of a failure. Understand the odds and act accordingly, with a Plan B in hand.
BTW, regarding OSU - My wife and I had lunch on Saturday with a cousin of my mother’s and his wife. Wonderful people, in their 80s - he was a dentist, and she was an actuary. Both attended OSU way back in the 1950s and 1960s.
She had an OSU themed cell phone cover, and they were both sad that the football season may be cancelled. Two of their kids attended OSU, one also attended dental school at OSU (one attended Michigan ?). They have grand-kids at OSU.
These are not atypical for OSU alumni, and there are hundreds of thousands of these across the country. Talk about an alumni network!
This is a great thread to research about NU for my daughter (class of 2022) who is a serious pianist, thinking about Environmental Engineering.
I will let my daughter choose between ED to NU or SCEA to HYPS and such. (I know which “I” will choose)
Thank you!
Hello @Scubaski1 I hope you are still active on this forum. Just curoius - how has your DD’s Wildcat experience been so far? Apparently, the interest in NU has been on the rise across the country. Quite a few engineering kids in my area are thinking about ED this upcoming cycle.
At the risk of angering the mods for replying to an old thread, my S likes Northwestern engineering’s fusion of analytical and creative thinking. Whole brain engineering they call it. He’s also really excited by their course offerings and thinks Evanston would be a great place to spend four years. It’s one of his top three schools.
Yes my son will likely be applying ED to Northwestern- he particularly likes that as an arts and sciences student you can take courses and even do a minor in the engineering school. Even transferring into engineering school seems more possible than at most other places. He loves engineering stuff but isn’t ready to commit to that as a full time thing as he has many other interests as well. And he liked Evanston and it’s proximity to Chicago. The size really seem right as well. And it seems much less intense than Uof Chicago with comparable academics and students.
The OP asked the question in Aug 2019. Obviously, decisions have been made in the interim. Prospective applicants may find the thread interesting, but new questions should really go on a new thread. Closing.