<p>Gadad is right that the undergraduate experience plays a huge role in one’s future life and career.</p>
<p>I do disagree, though with the intimation that the experience gained would be similar at Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Each has a very distinct culture and peer group. Harvard despite its reputation is not an especially welcoming destination for engineering or science majors. Harvard certainly does NOT have any “right of first refusal” on candidates strong in those fields. Most top engineering/CS candidates would not even consider Harvard as a destination. According to the Crimson, the Harvard newspaper, more than 80% of engineering majors drop out of engineering for another major before graduation. Your peer group will be overwhelmingly non-techie, unlike MIT and to a lesser extent Stanford, where you will find many more people with similar interests.</p>
<p>I’m familiar with Harvard in general, not with their CS and Eng in particular, so I’ll defer to Cellardweller’s assessment of its culture for majors in those fields.</p>
If so, that makes Harvard’s accomplishments in the sciences all the more impressive – such as it producing more NSF Graduate Research Fellowship winners than MIT, considerably more than Stanford, and nearly twice as many as Princeton.</p>
<p>That’s a value judgment…and one I disagree with strongly. There are MANY families for whom that choice makes perfect sense. It all depends on the particular student and the particular family.</p>
I’d like to know where that assessment comes from. My daughter is a sophomore physics concentrator at Harvard and she has found it to be entirely welcoming and supportive. Is the work difficult? - without a doubt. Does engineering lose a lot of concentrators? - yes, but that is true at most/all universities. Decades ago when I was at Georgia Tech students that struggled with engineering either switched to management or transferred to another college. There weren’t as many interesting alternatives as there are at Harvard.</p>
<p>^^^ I agree with Jonri regarding H, M, and S, and a few others at that level. I think that HYPMS - and particularly their students - constitute such an unusual level of excellence on the higher ed hierarchy, that I could easily see an additional $80-90K as a reasonable choice. I’d feel the same way about schools like Williams and Amherst too. But my 11th-grader, who should be in the ballpark admissions-wise for those schools, insists upon a big-time and accomplished marching band. That puts his top academic options - outside of our in-state public options, Georgia Tech and the UGA Honors Program - as Northwestern and Vanderbilt. I would be delighted for him to be at one of those, but I find myself balking at the big cost differential there. That’s nothing against NU and Vandy - I’ve done campus visits at both and love them both - I just find myself drawing the line of added-value beyond Georgia Tech at somewhere north of Northwestern and south of HYPSM. Other folks’ lines would adjust according to their own means, I suppose.</p>
Not really. MIT loses very few if any engineers to other fields. In fact, it adds engineering majors between sophomore and senior year, climbing from around 50% of the class to around 60% by graduation. This is in part due to the ease of getting a second major, especially in computer science. </p>
<p>The article does not reference a drop-out rate for natural science concentrators, but it seems unlikely to be very different from that in the biological sciences.</p>
<p>I chose the word universities because I intended to exclude “Institute of Technology(s)” such as MIT or my alma mater in stating that they lose a lot of engineering majors. The fact is that engineering is harder to get good grades than other majors and students at full universities see those in other majors doing better with less effort and therefore many move on to other fields. My point about my alma mater was that there were a lot fewer areas to move into without leaving the school. I also suspect that much of Harvard’s bio attrition is due to students coming to the realization that they do not want to go to medical school like they thought when the entered college.</p>
<p>Graduate school in CS is different from other fields. Don’t think of it like a liberal arts discipline. A Master’s is not that rewarding in terms of starting salary; in fact, it’s probably more profitable to get a good CS job after undergrad at a large firm, and let them pay for your grad school. This has the added advantage that you will have a much better idea of what area interests you and offers a better future.
PhD work in CS is a whole different animal. It’s an extremely long road aimed at a sort of academic superiority - I’ve read that when you get a PhD in a CS field, you could be considered one of the world’s experts in that area.
So, getting back to your question, in CS it makes a significant difference when you graduate one from of the top undergrad programs. That’s where the recruiters have set up shop!</p>
<p>I’m not sure if you are stating a reality here. Any links? </p>
<p>Here is a link I found: [Pax</a> Bellona: 2009 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Results](<a href=“http://paxbellona.blogspot.com/2009/04/nsf-graduate-research-fellowship.html]Pax”>http://paxbellona.blogspot.com/2009/04/nsf-graduate-research-fellowship.html).
Based on 2009 data, MIT and Berkeley college graduates won most NSF graduate Research Fellowships, followed by Harvard and Stanford. In 2009, 44 Berkeley undergraduates won NSF fellowships. When looking at Berkeley’s sheer number of winners, I feel that the quality of Berkeley’s undergraduates is probably well under-estimated by lots of people here, at least in science and engineering. In addition, the graduate schools that attracted most NSF graduate research fellowship winners in 2009 were Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. And in that order.</p>
<p>Does a major in CS strongly connect to the engineering majors at these schools? </p>
<p>I’m mostly interested in working as a software engineer in the future, and eventually moving up to management or taking on a research position.</p>
<p>In the end, this is my predicament for undergraduate. I don’t come from a wealthy family - I’m more of a lower-middle class family, and I do have a younger sibling. Going to college (regardless of which college or university), I’m going to need to rely nearly entirely on scholarships, grants, and financial aid. This is where some of the factors come in with choosing to attend (if possible) universities like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT.</p>
<p>First of all, get into all 3. Then we’ll discuss. This is what most American people fail to understand.
It’s not about YOU all the time. YOU don’t get to choose. THEY do.</p>