<p>I am interested in engineering but I also want a liberal arts education. Even so, would I be a "bad fit" for Yale? While Yale does have engineering, it does not strike me as a place to go to study the engineering sciences.</p>
<p>i put down biomedical engineering for yale. obviously johns hopkins, mit, or duke would be way better for it, but i still want to go to yale. definitely strong social sciences. plus, it's really all what you make of it. yale has the facilities for you to do research and professors and students in engineering departments are as smart as those at above schools.</p>
<p>Actually, Yale has easily one of the best undergraduate engineering programs in the country. It has greatly expanded over the past 5-10 years, but is still somewhat smaller than places like Purdue, Berkeley, MIT and other schools with thousands upon thousands of engineering students, so is sometimes misunderstood. See the CC thread at <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/375658-yale-engineering.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/375658-yale-engineering.html</a> for a much more detailed discussion of the program. </p>
<p>In terms of facilities, they are on par or better than those of any other top university, which is part of the reason why Yale is actually ranked #1 for engineering research impact (see the thread above), just above the runner-ups Caltech and Stanford. For example, they just finished an $8M clean room for cutting-edge nanotech research and two new biomedical engineering buildings (costing over $200M) with advanced labs, all of which are highly accessible to undergraduates - in stark contrast to some of the other research universities out there.</p>
<p>Also, if you want to study liberal arts as well, there is no better place to be.</p>
<p>thanks so much for the info. I was almost going to take Yale off my radar, but now I am giving it some serious consideration. A school with great programs in engineering AND liberal arts is just what I'm looking for.</p>
<p>Well, I have nothing against Yale's engineering program, but please don't use one study that looked at one measure of excellence to conclude that Yale has the #1 engineering program in the country. I don't think that would be the view of almost anyone in the engineering/research community.</p>
<p>However, I am sure that, within the areas it has chosen to focus on, it has an excellent program, and you couldn't go wrong there. And the small size and liberal arts environment may be just the thing for you.</p>
<p>But I think the overall #1 claim is highly questionable. Anyway, it is debated on the thread PosterX mentioned, so you can see the rebuttal there.</p>
<p>yeah I know I'm weighing the pros/cons. I'm not ready to believe that Yale is tops in undergraduate engineering, but there's a lot of other factors that make it worth applying to. And to find a school with good engineering and good liberal arts is hard. I'm looking to go to grad school too, at this point, so I don't necessarily have to focus completely on going to a "prestigious" engineering school yet. Hypothetically, if I were to attend Yale and study engineering+liberal arts, if all goes well, would I be just as competitive applying to grad school at, say, MIT, than an undergraduate engineering major at, say, Stanford would be?</p>
<p>In general, they would look at your area of focus within eng as an undergraduate, the profs who recommend you, etc. If your specialty was recognized as a strong area at that school, or the prof was well known, you would have a pretty good profile, as strong as someone who went to a bigger eng school with many strong areas of focus. If not, then not...</p>
<p>The main risk with a small eng school is that the area you may decide, 2 years from now, that you are excited about may not be an area they are investing in. The plus is the more personal attention and opportunity to form strong relationships with the profs, so you don't risk being anonymous. </p>
<p>I have thought about this a lot, as an engineering grad myself, who is also advising a daughter who is applying this year and is interested, as you are, in studying eng in a liberal arts environment (so is not looking at Caltech or MIT).</p>
<p>Yes, Yale engineering students do extremely well at getting into top graduate engineering programs because of the work they were able to do as undergraduates. Talk to professors at the school for more specific evidence of this. Also, keep in mind that if you want to go to graduate school in engineering you don't necessarily have to major in it as an undergraduate.</p>
<p>a small program that's apparently getting smaller:</p>
<p>Over the past decade, the number of students majoring in Yale’s sciences — particularly its Engineering and Physics departments — have declined significantly, Koelle said. </p>
<p>“Ten years ago, we had 40 to 50 percent more MB&B majors, and the same was the case in chemistry, engineering and physics,” he said. “There’s been a downward trend in student interest in these areas.” </p>
<p>Yale</a> Daily News - Increased enrollment could bolster sciences</p>
<p>yale is ranked #37 by u.s. news for undergraduate engineering.</p>
<p>Although the YDN doesn't offer any exact statistics and is therefore impossible to draw conclusions from, it is quite possible that Yale's engineering program is smaller in terms of # of undergraduates -- this is a major national trend, not something unique to Yale. But Yale engineering is definitely not smaller in terms of the # of faculty or research groups. If you look at the USNWR engineering list, you'll see the list is basically related to program size/quantity, not quality. Of the top 50 programs in that magazine, Yale is by far the smallest, which is actually a pretty good indication of its quality given that it shows up in the survey despite its relatively small size. In quality-based rankings, as you know, Yale is ranked #1 by ISI, just above Stanford and Caltech. ISI is easily the most respected data organization in the world (publisher of SCI).</p>