My daughter is considering Williams and wanted to be an engineer. But, now she has visited Williams and fell in love with the school. She now says that she will go there and then get an engineering degree in grad school. Does this make sense? I think if she goes there she might change to a math or physics major. But, if not, would a degree from Williams be a strong path into a good engineering graduate program? She also loves Lehigh…with Cornell and Harvard rounding out her list of schools.
Depends on the type of engineering. But she should consider the following:
- Engineering PhD study is generally funded, but MS study may not be.
- A student with a math or physics undergraduate degree is likely to need to take additional undergraduate level engineering courses before getting to graduate level engineering courses when enrolled in graduate study.
If she wants to be an engineer she needs to go to a school that has engineering.
I will tell her that. I think she could still be an engineer if she went to Williams, but her college years will be longer as she would need more courses in grad school. She needs to know what she is getting in to.
As an anecdote, I know a few people who have gone this route (physics to engineering). They all found it difficult to transition from a pure science to engineering and would recommend against that approach.
However, if she is interested in math, she could move into a more applied math graduate program, like operations research.
If she is interested in mechanical, chemical or electrical engineering, I think an undergrad engineering experience would be much better than a math or physics degree.
Williams is a great school. But, not a great fit for everyone.
I think your daughter needs to consider how committed she is to a career in engineering and what information she has to base that commitment on. In America, there few professional degrees are offered on the undergraduate level. Those that are available – for example engineering, architecture – require a serious commitment and have high drop out rates. It’s difficult for a high school student to have a clear picture of what they’re getting themselves into when they sign up for an undergraduate professional degree. They also often don’t have an understanding of other less clearly delineated career paths that might be available to them.
My son knew from an early age that he wanted to be an architect, but when it came time to make a college choice he decided to go with a general liberal arts education (at Williams actually). He received a wonderful education and was able to continue on for a master of architecture at a top graduate program. The downsides were that it took longer (7.5 years vs 5.0) and cost a whole lot more. In his case it was the right decision, but you have to weigh both the pros and cons, especially the financial aspect.
If I were advising your daughter, I’d ask a lot of questions to find out just how much she loves Williams compared to other schools and how much she is set on becoming an engineer. If she feels more at home at Williams than ANY other school by far and is only reasonably sure that she would like be an engineer, I’d strongly recommend that she choose Williams.
For most undergraduates, I think finding a place they can thrive, grow and achieve is more important than strictly following a career path (unless that path is unusually clear). Achieving a solid record at Williams will open doors to almost, if not all, graduate programs that may interest her in the future.
Some degrees transition well from undergrad major of one type (1) to grad school of another type (2), especially if the student has taken a lot of courses of type (2) as an undergrad. I don’t believe this works very well for getting into engineering grad school.
If your daughter is contemplating this route, she should look at the web pages on grad school in engineering at various schools where she might think about doing graduate work. It might be advisable to email the graduate admissions contact person in a department/university or two, to see whether her plan would work out for them.
It is not all that easy to find the undergraduate course/degree requirements for admission to graduate engineering programs on the web (based on a quick check of a few departments at the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, and Ohio State University).
However, the University of Wisconsin provides more information than most about the undergraduate degree expectations. Here are the results I found for the admissions requirements of several departments in engineering there. (This next part is very closely paraphrased from the Wisconsin site, where not quoted directly):
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Nuclear engineering and physics: Bachelor’s degree in engineering or physical science + one course in each of the following areas a) nuclear physics, b) materials science, metallurgy, or solid-state physics, c) heat transfer or fluid dynamics, and d) mechanics. They also have expectations in math, but a math or physics major would meet those. They say that a student can enter without these courses, but must take all of them before receiving a degree (even an M.S.) and that none of the credits count toward the graduate degree requirements. (My note: Physics will offer mechanics and may have undergraduate fluid dynamics or hydrodynamics, but the physics courses will not be oriented in the way that the corresponding engineering courses are.)
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“Mechanical engineering (Master’s level): Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, or Bachelor of Science in the department from the physical sciences, and Mechanical Engineering equivalency in the specific area of study for the Master’s degree plus departmental approval.” Others considered on an individual basis.
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“Chemical engineering: A bachelor’s degree with a strong background in engineering from an approved (ABET accredited) institution.”
It should be noted that ABET is not a general college accreditation. It is the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
Generally speaking, if someone wants to do a graduate program in engineering, they are much better off doing an undergraduate degree in engineering. In many universities, it is not possible to take a large number of courses in engineering while majoring in something else, because admission to the undergraduate courses is limited to engineering majors. Engineering majors often have minimum college GPA requirements to be admitted to the major, if they do not admit directly to engineering majors at the freshman application level.
Engineering tends to be tightly regulated by the accrediting agencies. There are various certification exams for B.S. graduates. Also, it is really a quite different way of thinking from physics, let alone mathematics.
Williams is a great school. It would be a fine plan to major in math or physics there and go on to graduate study in the same field. I think it would not be a good plan to hope to change over to engineering in grad school.
Suggest your daughter write down what she fell in love with at Williams to clarify what type of undergraduate education & experience she wants.
When she has a clear picture of how Williams calls to her, she can think through how becoming an engineer fits, e.g. see QuantMech on engineering curriculum
It’s possible to graduate from Williams & pursue engineering. If you take a look at Williams’ physics department’s list of alumni, you’ll find some who enter & complete master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering. The department also has a pre-engineering advisor.
(btw/ my Eph majored in physics & math, but hasn’t been interested in engineering)
Williams does partner with Columbia in a 3-2 program and Dartmouth in a 2-1-1-1 program: https://physics.williams.edu/pre-engineering/
But that may cost more.
Unless she is considering Williams for ED, this isn’t a decision she has to make now (and may not be her decision to make anyway).
I presume she is applying to more than those 4 schools?
Has she considered Swarthmore, which has many similarities to Williams and does have a general engineering degree? I myself was a Swat engineering major (back in the dark ages) and went directly to Stanford PhD in Electrical Engineering. I agree with others that Physics and Engineering at the undergrad level have a lot of “gaps” between them.
My daughter was in a similar situation last year. She was interested in engineering, but then we visited Middlebury and she loved it (so did I!). However, we continued to visit more schools and in the end, she decided that pursuing engineering was the overriding factor. We considered 3-2 programs, but she decided that she would never want to leave after junior year to move to another school (or do a 5th year just to get a BS when she could get a masters in the same amount of time doing a standard engineering program). Cornell and Lehigh were also high on her list, along with Northwestern and WashU. She ended up doing ED at Cornell and has had no regrets at all so far (although she hasn’t started yet, so we’ll see how it goes . . )
D2 explored similar options and was strongly considering Vassar at one point. It turns out that very few people do the 3+2 or similar programs. Always ask how many students do it.
Then she primarily investigated chemistry or computer science options. These turn out to make it possible to add a masters in engineering but it was going to be more challenging than we had initially thought. There are a lot of requirements and information that would have been missed by not having an engineering undergrad. It appears that engineering is the major that seems to allow a student to switch into other majors fairly easily, but is quite challenging to switch into because of the combination of math, science and engineering courses that are required.
While it is true that most students who begin engineering programs drop out, it is not true for that quality of student that you and I are discussing. At this level, most of the students do finish. Be sure to check completion rates for the schools you are investigating. I think Lehigh was around 80% completion rate. It varies a lot by school.
Eventually she decided to stick with engineering. Her final four schools were Lehigh, Case Western, Wisconsin, and Illinois. In the end, she chose Lehigh.
She had a successful freshman year last year, but she did change her major from Chemical engineering to Materials engineering. As a freshman engineer she has the ability to investigate various engineering majors. I think that is valuable too. She is also adding some CS courses.
She is probably going to work a bit after finishing her BSE and then go back to grad school but she will have a wide range of options that are possible in engineering because she completed all of the requirements for an ABET accredited program.
Good luck. There is no right or wrong answer. She just has to decide what is right for her.
@GardenLady If both Williams and Lehigh appeal to your daughter, then maybe she should check out Bucknell, which is like a hybrid of the two. Bucknell is a liberal arts college in a rural small-town setting with a close-knit campus community (like Williams), but it is simultaneously a Patriot League school with an engineering program (like Lehigh).
Lafayette would be another possibility; it is also a Patriot League LAC with engineering, but does not have the rural setting of Williams or Bucknell. Lafayette is Lehigh’s biggest athletic rival; Bucknell might be second.
Another consideration. With Harvard in the list will your D want just any school for engineering or one of the top tier programs? Perhaps she should expand her list to investigate the top engineering schools in the fields that interest her and do comparisons of required/offered courses and experiences.
I agree with engineering and pure science being vastly different. I was an undergrad chemistry major and chem E was of no interest to me (I became a physician). Your D needs to make this major decision regarding engineering options before choosing a school. Perhaps she knows of engineering but not opportunities available with other fields. Her school choices mentioned seem to be ones she has heard of, not based on research into best for a field ones. Also related to your geographic location only. btw- only heard of Williams on CC- one of the myriads of east coast privates I guess.
I looked at the Williams website. So different for sciences than a major research institution with grad school courses available to undergrads in math and sciences.
For more info, you might look for Williams on the USN&WR ranking of “national liberal arts colleges”. I believe it has been ranked #1 in this category for the past 10+ years.
Another significant difference is that all faculty research relies exclusively on undergraduate collaborators, since there are no grad students or post-docs. I believe that Williams also ranks #1 among all colleges and universities in terms of the American Physical Society’s annual Apker Awards, for physics research by undergraduates.
@wis75 's comment is particularly inapt with regard to Williams, because a significant aspect of Williams is its tutorial system, like Oxbridge, which effectively turns curriculum into an individualized agreement between a student and the department’s faculty. (That’s true to a large extent at other top LACs, too, but Williams really formalizes it.)
It’s certainly true that the Williams faculty in any field will not be as deep as that at a major research university, that they will be less on the cutting edge of research in their fields, and that the lack of graduate students meaningfully reduces the size of the community around any topic and the type and volume of research going on. Williams students have to learn what the faculty there can teach them. But Williams students seem to do extremely well in applying to PhD programs. In large part, I think that’s because Williams faculty see it as their responsibility to give their students the strongest possible foundation for graduate work in their field, whereas faculty at Research U see it as their responsibility to teach students about the research they are doing. There’s a meaningful difference, although both paths can be successful.
According to a recent NSF study, Williams ranked #15 nationally in the percentage of graduates who went on to earn science or engineering doctorates between 2002-2011. Williams was ranked ahead of schools like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Yale, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins in this regard.
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/nsf13323.pdf
A few more noteworthy points about this study:
(1) Williams, like most LACs, has no undergraduate engineering program, which is surely a handicap in a study that addresses science and engineering doctorates collectively. If the NSF had ranked in terms of science doctorates alone (excluding engineering), Williams would have ranked significantly higher.
(2) Several other LACs, including Harvey Mudd, Reed, Swarthmore, Carleton, Pomona, Haverford, and Grinnell, ranked even higher than Williams by this measure. Note that most of these schools (except Mudd and Swat) are handicapped in the same way as Williams by the absence of engineering programs.
None of this necessarily makes Williams a great choice for engineering. If you want to pursue a career in engineering, the best route will typically be a school with an ABET-accredited BS program in engineering. However, Williams and other top LACs can be terrific choices for an undergraduate degree in physical science or math.
I work at a peer institution of Williams. I have had a fair number of students who graduated with math degrees – some coupled with an engineering degree through our partnership program – and went on to do graduate degrees in engineering at top schools. I believe the physics department at Williams keeps a list of engineering grad programs to which their own graduates have been accepted. Although I don’t know the details, I believe Williams also has a partnership program with Columbia (or is it Cornell?) through which a student can spend 5 years split between the two campuses, and get both a science degree and an engineering degree. So if your daughter is set on Williams, there are options for her.
You might also, as others have suggested, consider schools in Williams’ peer group (Swarthmore, Smith, Bucknell) that do have engineering. You might also consider Dartmouth.