Reply to Engineering- importance of going top 10

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Engineering- importance of going top 10"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I know conventional wisdom is that it doesn’t matter where you go as long it’s abet certified, but beyond that, what really is the difference between a Purdue or Michigan vs Ohio state or Penn state vs Pitt. Are the top 10 worth striving for and then beyond that it doesn’t matter? Should  you go to Penn state rather Pitt because of ranking? Surely the “top” schools offer something more? Or are rankings in this area basically meaningless?[/quote]

I went to UIUC and the US News rankings show MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Berkeley, Cal Tech, UIUC, Michigan, Cornell, Purdue, and Carnegie Mellon as the Top 10 engineering programs.

I think that GT, UC-Berkeley, UIUC, Michigan and Purdue are more similar to each other than the others. I think the schools in the Top 25 or so that are peers include Penn State, Maryland, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, etc.

The main difference between UIUC and the top 10 public universities versus the other top 25 publics in engineering is really the size and quality of the programs. They just good in the big disciplines like EE, ME, CS, CE, etc. They are good at all of them and have some of the top faculty, researchers, facilities, and graduate programs. While other schools will have very strong programs in some, and then others might be more luckluster or nothing special, or even tiny.

The other is that top 10 public universities have HUGE PhD programs. Very big and an insane amount of PhD candidates from all over the world. So the research is much more varied, it is better funded and has more diversified funding. The type of research you can do when you have a monster sized budget and 500 PhDs in EE and CE is much different if you only have 12 PhDs.

So what is the benefit to undergrads?

1) Recruiting is nationwide and they will go much deeper into the classes at those schools. The further you go down in the rankings it is much less varied job opportunities and it is more regional. 
2) It is really easy to get research. It is to the point they professors and PhDs are begging for research help and will pay and compete for the best students. As a result, it is really easy to find people to network with to help you if you plan on graduate school or academia. 
3) The breath of classes is more varied your junior and senior years. The size of the faculty and undergraduate population, the funding the facilities just lets them to create more interesting classes, activities, do more competition teams, etc.

But make no mistake, it wasn't like UIUC was like a gatekeeper for some types of jobs. This wasn't like investment banking or stuff like that. Also, not every student got great jobs. If you were really smart, hardworking, and diligent, you were going to do well. But I knew guys that had mental health issues, kids that got burned out, lacked motivation, didn't do well in class and struggled to get jobs. I remember my junior year, they took in a ton of community college kids and many of them struggled. I knew a ton of them transferred to liberal arts or business, many took like IT jobs or worked in software related consulting or basically sales jobs.

The top students at schools like UIC (Illinois-Chicago) got better jobs than a lot of the bottom 1/3 at UIUC.

UIUC, Purdue, Michigan, Cal, and Georgia Tech gave you more opportunities and the better students could take advantage of them. But it wasn't a guarantee.

I visited VT (looked like a very good engineering program) for their open house and talked to a lot of the students in EE and CE. They seemed to have very similar experiences as I did, but I just thought there were more of everything at UIUC (including stress and competition). [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics