Disclosure: I am a Yale College (undergrad) Engineering graduate (ABET BS Mech. Eng. 2003) with a job in mainstream engineering. I have been working at General Electric in design engineering for about 10 years.
Replies above seem about on target, but I’ll offer a few additional words to attempt to round out answers to the questions at the top, as best I can from my mostly 1999-2003 perspective:
Q1) Ease of collaboration and teamwork in Yale Engineering?
A1) The small size of the department usually means you are taking classes with the same people much of the time. As long as your classmates are friendly and interested in collaborative learning, teamwork should be readily available.
I was on the sailing team with 2 others (of 10 that year) in Mechanical Engineering, lived with these guys senior year and worked with them all the time for a few years. Our typical upper-class study group expanded to include some other MechEs as class enrollment and academic guidelines permitted. Freshman year was easier since classes were usually prerequisites and larger. I believe Yale at least was generally collaborative in the sense you ask about.
Q2) Resources for hands-on?
A2) My typical answer to this question is that Yale has generally been more theoretical and less hands-on, but was trying to be more hands-on when I was there near 2003 and appears to have persisted in this direction since then. I recall from 2003 that Yale had 2 machine shops and 1 3D printer. Yale should have more in the 3D printing area than that by now.
Note that while the field of engineering expands every year, the duration of a Yale engineering degree is still 4 years, as far as I know. I believe an old Yale justification for being more theoretical was that Yale students are smart enough to learn the hands-on techniques on their own, and eventually will. When I took Yale’s “CAD” class, we didn’t learn how to use AutoCAD/SolidWorks/UG, etc. we wrote CAD software, arguably learning the more difficult aspects of CAD.
Another part of the answer is that if you want to be hands-on, you can be hands on - just get Yale to cook up a class for you, make your senior project hands-on, do summer interships in hands-on oriented companies, join/rejuvenate engineering clubs doing hands-on work, etc.
When looking into this question again today, I found the websites below.
Yale OpenHand Project: http://www.eng.yale.edu/grablab/openhand/
The Center for Engineering Innovation & Design: http://hshm.yale.edu/center-engineering-innovation-and-design
The Yale Engineering Design Team: http://www.yale.edu/yedt/index.html
See also my answer to Q3.
Q3) Does a degree from Yale in Engineering prepare you for a role in traditional engineering?
A3) My answer is “it can certainly be the path you choose.” I view Yale’s ABET accreditation as a main link to traditional engineering that Yale should still be preserving.
Yale still appears to view Engineering in the larger scope of solving humanity’s problems in an integrated fashion (see reference to humanities at top of http://seas.yale.edu/undergraduate-study), but has careful mention of design of devices and systems and “modern software tools” which aim in the direction of more traditional engineering.
Though schools like Penn State, Ohio State, Virginia and Georgia Tech, etc. may feed traditional engineering firms more heavily than Yale and have a stronger network into these positions, there is still a Yale network that can offer some support and much of the theoretical coursework at Yale uses some of the same textbooks that are used at more engineering-focused schools. When I started at GE, I felt a bit behind some colleagues from state schools in the hands-on area (thermocouples, automobile system design, Finite Element, CAD, CFD software, etc.) but picked it up after a while and now feel I’m running a little ahead. Traditional engineering company entry-level training programs and internal training options can be used to help bridge some of these gaps, if they still exist.
And in case Yale doesn’t yet have a decent engineering career fair, you can drive down to the Princeton Engineering fair like my roommates and I did to find yourself a job.
To leverage my misreading of Q3:
Q4) Does a degree from Yale in Engineering prepare you for finance and consulting?
A4) My answer is yes. Of the 9 other Mechanical Engineers, I graduated with, I recall 2 or 3 ended up in finance or consulting. I usually add that a degree in engineering prepares you to handle quantitative aspects of hard sciences. If you can do that, you can certainly handle the easier (but perhaps more remunerative) task of the quantitative aspects of finance and consulting. As a bonus, you actually get some understanding of the companies you are working for or on, so the engineers don’t just laugh at you.