Anonymous wrote:Aerospace = Purdue

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Engineer here. There are really no bad engineering programs because they tend to weed less qualified or motivated students out. The difference between elite schools (eg MIT, Stanford) and everyone else is that the weeding out happens during admissions. And of course those elite schools have great networks,facilities, etc. But your child will get a solid education from any program. I say this having attended both a normal school for undergrad and an "elite" school for grad school.

Have you considered co-op schools, like Drexel or Northeastern? These programs will allow your child to actually try out engineering for six months at a time, in a form of extended paid internship. Really good experience and provides your child with info on whether engineering will be a good career fit (vs just class study) and whether they should consider a different type of engineering (eg comp vs electrical) based on the type of work. We engineers call this a feed back loop

But those schools do not guarantee co-ops, do they? Like internships, some get them and some do not. Not sure why people say "go to a co-op school" like you're handed a co-op as part of the education. If you go to a co-op school and struggle to find a co-op, I suspect you look like a failure and feel like one. And there are all types of reasons why qualified people could struggle to find one. Same way not all qualified people get admitted to schools. More applicants than seats.

Anonymous wrote:Engineer here. There are really no bad engineering programs because they tend to weed less qualified or motivated students out. The difference between elite schools (eg MIT, Stanford) and everyone else is that the weeding out happens during admissions. And of course those elite schools have great networks,facilities, etc. But your child will get a solid education from any program. I say this having attended both a normal school for undergrad and an "elite" school for grad school.

Have you considered co-op schools, like Drexel or Northeastern? These programs will allow your child to actually try out engineering for six months at a time, in a form of extended paid internship. Really good experience and provides your child with info on whether engineering will be a good career fit (vs just class study) and whether they should consider a different type of engineering (eg comp vs electrical) based on the type of work. We engineers call this a feed back loop

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You should also research carefully the retention rate. Some schools are notorious for weeding kids out. You also need to consider whether there's a cap on the number of kids allowed in each field of engineering. For example, some schools (I believe Purdue & Va Tech are like this) do not directly admit to the different majors. Instead, you take general engineering courses in your first year and then apply for your choice of engineering but it's based on gpa so you may not get into your choice if there are too many kids applying to that field. So if your dc has a specific engineering he/she has in mind, it could be a gamble to go to a school like this.

Researching the retention rate does not seem to be an easy task. We visited Cornell recently for a general tour and the Econ major tour guide cited a statistic showing a very low retention rate for chemical engineering while the glossy engineering materials we got from the Yang Welcome Center indicated that 86% of kids who enroll in the college of engineering graduate within 4 years. The only school website I’ve found that has somewhat deducible engineering retention rates is Purdue and there the rates seem to be much lower but among the highest of the various schools that comprise that university.

Taking the above at face value, it means that a non-trivial percentage of initial ChemE majors ultimately switch to a different Engineering degree within Cornell, but do graduate with some Engineering degree.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You should also research carefully the retention rate. Some schools are notorious for weeding kids out. You also need to consider whether there's a cap on the number of kids allowed in each field of engineering. For example, some schools (I believe Purdue & Va Tech are like this) do not directly admit to the different majors. Instead, you take general engineering courses in your first year and then apply for your choice of engineering but it's based on gpa so you may not get into your choice if there are too many kids applying to that field. So if your dc has a specific engineering he/she has in mind, it could be a gamble to go to a school like this.

Researching the retention rate does not seem to be an easy task. We visited Cornell recently for a general tour and the Econ major tour guide cited a statistic showing a very low retention rate for chemical engineering while the glossy engineering materials we got from the Yang Welcome Center indicated that 86% of kids who enroll in the college of engineering graduate within 4 years. The only school website I’ve found that has somewhat deducible engineering retention rates is Purdue and there the rates seem to be much lower but among the highest of the various schools that comprise that university.