According to the ratings, Cornell has the best engineering school out of the three mentioned above. Is it also the most rigorous? I hear all three are pretty tough. Also, does Cornell encourage girls in engineering, i.e. have a supportive SWE chapter, etc.?
Cornell has the best engineering program (according to US News) out of all the Ivies. Princeton is second, but it has a tiny, tiny program in the field. Columbia is great as well, although it's more liberal arts based.
Why Ivy for engineering though? All of those schools pale in comparison to the engineering prowess of MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and probably a bunch of other tech schools as well.
We are actually applying to other schools than just the Ivies. Caltech and Stanford are too far at this stage of the game though. As mentioned, we were also wondering what engineering departments are most female friendly.
I would wait to see if you actually getting into all 3 of those schools before deciding which one would be best, unless you're deciding which one to apply early to.
She is interested in civil-environmental engineering and also looking into some non Ivies such as Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. Anyway familiar with those schools?
If you mean as far as overall reputation -- Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and Maryland in that order. If you're stats are good enough for Cornell, Columbia or Princeton, you may get merit money from Carnegie and will likely get merit money from Maryland.
Please note the link fom 4thfloor (#10), the rankings are based on " the priorities you set" and indicates that if you change your priorities, the list will change. So who knows what 4thfloor's prioritiess were.
A ranking that changes with your specific priorities is useful with helping to select schools, but meaningless otherwise.
Our friend's daughter turned down MIT to attend UMD as a civil engineering major with a full ride scholarship. I heard she got several internship offers including Exxon Mobile, during the summer after freshman year.
