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but other than those two yea ivy sucks for engineering
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That's a bit harsh, don't you think? I only have the USNews Graduate Edition handy (don't have the undergrad edition around here), but I see that even the
worst-ranked engineering program in an Ivy (Brown) is ranked #53, which I still think is pretty darn good, considering that there are literally
hundreds of engineering programs out there.
Put another way, if Brown sucks at engineering, what does that say about all the other programs (which are the vast majority) that are ranked even
lower?
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oh and I forgot, I think columbia has a good engineering school, but I never checked it out before
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Uh, Princeton is ranked
higher in engineering than is Columbia, according to the USNews Grad Edition.
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FYI, I know that you can only trust US News rankings so far, but at the grad level (which I think they do better at than undergrad) they consider Harvard and Princeton engineering better than Columbia
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Actually, Harvard is ranked a little bit lower than Columbia.
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There's cross-enrollment between places like Harvard and MIT, but... do you really, really want to shuttle-hop between your classes?
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Well, actually, I don't think it's much of a problem at all, due to the sheer convenience of the T (the subway). For example, I knew a guy at MIT who once calculated that it actually took him
less time to get from his MIT dorm room to his cross-registered Harvard class than it took for him to get to some of his
MIT classes. I think that just demonstrates how easy it really is to use the T.
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I'd say that unless there's a specific advantage that going to an ivy (aside from, for example, Cornell, which is considered to be a prestigious engineering school *and* happens to be an ivy) presents you with (flexibility of choice, a lack of intention to stay in engineering, a preference of college "fit", something like that), then you should go with a school that has a clear-cut engineering department. Save yourself some headache and hassle.
There are those who disagree with me on this, and their opinions are perfectly valid. They will likely show up and express their opinions. They're not likely to change my mind.
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My main issue is what I have seen, and surely what you have seen too: that the vast majority of students end up changing majors from what they thought they would be doing when they matriculated. If anything, I would suspect this is even more true of engineering, for, let's face it, most freshmen have no idea what engineering is all about. At least with the sciences and humanities, one might be able to develop some familiarity with those topics by taking the corresponding classes in high school: for example, high school graduates will have taken classes in math, English, chemistry, biology, etc., so they have some idea of what these topics are about. Very few high schools teach
engineering classes. My high school certainly did not.
Hence, most prospective engineering students enter college with little idea of what it means to study engineering, and only in college do they find out, whereupon many will switch because they find out that engineering is not actually interesting to them, and even of those who want to stay, quite a few of them are
forced to leave engineering because they can't survive the weeders. Hence, you have to think about what else are you going to do if you find out that engineering is not for you. For example, what if you turn down, say, Harvard for Georgia Tech for engineering, only to find out later that you don't want to major in engineering anymore? I'll bet you'd have wished that you could have that choice back, but you can't.
Heck, even many engineering students themselves don't really want to be engineers. As I have pointed out numerous times before, a significant chunk of graduating engineers from the best engineering schools (i.e. MIT, Stanford) don't take jobs as engineers but instead enter banking or consulting, or enter unrelated graduate programs (i.e. medicine, law, etc.) In other words, many of the best engineering graduates apparently and ironically don't want to work as engineers. So, again, I pose to you, what if you turn down Harvard for Georgia Tech for engineering and actually complete the engineering degree, but then decide that you actually would prefer to be an investment banker instead? Again, you probably wish you could have that choice back, but you can't.
That's why I place a high premium of flexibility and safety. The vast vast majority of incoming college freshmen don't really know what they want to do for a career. Hence, I disagree with the premise of the original question, for it presumes that people actually know that they want to work as engineers.