<p>As far as grad school acceptance, Smith College’s engineering program (all women) has an agreement with certain grad schools (I know one is Princeton) that if you graduate with at least a 3.5 GPA (both major and cumulative), then you are guaranteed admission.</p>
<p>Wow. Enginox & Jack:</p>
<p>Your attitudes, and correct me if I’m wrong, are that women are for kissing and making sandwiches, and we should have more in engineering because otherwise we just sit around talking to dudes all day.</p>
<p>With attitudes like that I can understand why women tend to stay away from engineering.</p>
<p>Auburn…now that just ticks me off…I said nothing about making sandwiches. I did talk about how women who are solid workers and researchers make an environment better though. They come with a different perspective and background. This is good and has nothing to do with a physical attraction.</p>
<p>Sure, I’d like to “kiss” a woman, so to speak, with similar interests and goals as I have. This doesn’t mean I’m inappropriate, unprofessional, or start working relationships with woman with this goal in mind.</p>
<p>When classes are more of a mixed gender, the students are acting appropriately, and everybody feels comfortable, life is good and relationships are more likely to happen. What on earth is wrong with that?</p>
<p>Well, for me, women are for kissing and making sandwiches. If they can also educate themselves and become independent yet still continue making me sandwiches and kissing me, even better. Women also enjoy looking at men, in case you didn’t know.</p>
<p>Whatever people may think, I’d rather look at a woman in a classroom than in a strip bar and I’m certain many women would agree with me.</p>
<p>haha i love the direction this thread has gone…well thanks everyone for your input!</p>
<p>i though i’d just let you know i’ve decided to switch from engineering to sandwich assembly, minor in eye candy</p>
<p>Oddly enough, some of the best chefs in the world are men… O.o</p>
<p>They are still ugly, though.</p>
<p>As to the original question, yes, the overwhelming majority of colleges (including Carnegie Mellon) treat women as URMs for the purpose of admission to engineering and thus being a woman is a favorable factor considered (exceptions would be public colleges in states that prohibit considering race, ethnic origin, or sex for admission such as in California). How much of an advantage it is varies. An MIT admissions officer once described it as like being given an extra 20 points on your SAT. Considering that the average SAT for admission to MIT is somewhere in the 2250 range, that does not mean you can have low stats and get in.</p>
<p>I’m a girl in engineering, and when I was looking at research/internship opportunities for the summer, many of them said that URM’s and females were encouraged to apply, and even sometimes preferred.</p>
<p>I would say there is a preference for females simply due to the lack of them. I know girls have an easier time getting into the College of Engineering at VT. I have even heard people advise girls wanting to go to VT to apply for an engineering major and to just switch out once they’re in. I could be wrong, but I definitely think there is some kind of affirmative action going on. Just google about lack of females in engineering, and you’ll find loads of links about trying to get more females into engineering.</p>
<p>I can’t think of how many times I’ve been searching for engineering scholarships, thought i’ve found a good one, then realized its provided by some kind of Women in Engineering group… ugh. Even my schools scholarships have a couple URM or women only ones. </p>
<p>One of my engineering profs this year basically went out of his way whenever he could to talk about hoe great women on the sciences are or to tell the guys in the class “don’t make them the secretary” or something like that when we got into groups. He also constantly brought up his organization, Girls in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (GEECS ). It was like dude we get it… man.</p>
<p>The best was when a guy from google came in and during his presentation he was pitching this competition or contest or something we should all apply for. So my roommate and I looked it up and it all but said “white males and asian males need not apply” fantastic.</p>
<p>And my last story to conclude my rant as I battle insomnia was the diversity workshop for American Nuclear Society. Nuclear Engineering is dominated by white males, I mean absolutely dominated. In our meeting the next topic in this workshop (dumbest thong I’ve ever seen/done by the way) was about this discrepancy. One female in the group went on and on about the fact there weren’t a lot of females or URMs and she said we had to bring diversity to the department. Now that kinda ****ed me off. I mean, no one is telling these groups of people they can’t apply. Hell, we’ve already seen they have an advantage on acceptance. What more do we need to do? If they don’t want to do NE we shouldn’t lower standards even more or make quotas or something just so our diversity statistics can look nicer. </p>
<p>Well I hope you enjoyed this rant. I’m a white, middle class male by the way. But if u didn’t know that already you weren’t paying attention.</p>
<p>I can’t speak for everywhere but I imagine it’s a little bit of affirmative action + women are more self selective. For instance one year at Olin college 1/3 of applicants where women. But 0 women where in the bottom 1/3 of the applicant pool. Meaning in the top 2/3’s, 1/2 were men and 1/2 were women. However, I also have noticed that engineering schools tend to have lower yields for women than men. So if they want to have 10 men they offer 12, but if they want 10 women they offer 15. I’m guessing this is because less women in engineering mean each woman has more offers to choose from. Given this, it seems they have to offer spots to a higher % of women who apply to get a desired number than men.</p>
<p>All things being equal, I think it’s completely appropriate and good for a school to select for diversity (race, geography, interests, etc). After all, there has to be some way to choose between two equally qualified candidates.</p>
<p>Edit: I remembered one thing. While interning for a major defense company one summer the interns got a hold of the HR intern recruiting document and among other things they were required to have at least 25% of interns be female. At another major defense company I interned for there were 500 applicants for every one spot. If this was the same at the first, it did not mean unqualified girls were getting guys spots but it did mean, given two qualified candidates, a girl would have a better shot.</p>