3.7 in Mech E possible?

Space Ranger 454 · 04-30-2008, 05:53 PM

Can anyone share their experiences in this program. I will be a freshman MechE this fall and pre-med. In order to be competitive for med school, a 3.7 is what I'm shooting for. Is this impossible?

chuy · 04-30-2008, 05:59 PM

Well, everything is possible I suppose, but that's going to be really, really, really, really hard. A 3.7 is an exceptionally GPA in any engineering majors. Unless engineering at your school is really easy, but there aren't many schools like that.

Mr Payne · 04-30-2008, 08:41 PM

A 3.7 in engineering generally requires you to be substantially smarter than your competition and you need to work very hard. A 3.7 is probably around the 90th-95th percentile in most programs.

im_blue · 04-30-2008, 08:50 PM

A 3.7 GPA in MechE is possible, but very difficult. It's probably around top 10% at most schools, so you'd probably need to be significantly smarter than your classmates.

BoelterHall · 04-30-2008, 10:12 PM

At UCLA, a 3.7 is about 90th percentile.

Mr Payne · 05-01-2008, 12:24 AM

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My child graduated from one of the top engineering schools with a 3.66. While he was not one of the smartest kids, he did work hard.

What was the engineering colleges average SAT and what was his SAT? I tend to believe that the tip top generally game in as extremely competitive students.

csprof2000 · 05-01-2008, 12:42 AM

Yes, it is possible to get a 4.0 in any major. Just get all the answers right on tests.

RacinReaver · 05-01-2008, 01:26 AM

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I tend to believe that the tip top generally game in as extremely competitive students.

In my time at CMU (a fairly well ranked school, I like to think), those of us that tended to get the highest grades in our major worked together on our assignments. We'd work together on labs, and the only time I heard of people screwing others over on work were the few people who belonged to a sorority that had homework databases, so they had the solutions for classes where professors didn't change problem sets much.

I think there's two different things that can develop when dealing with extremely smart people. You can get what seems to be the pre-med mentality, where it's every man for himself, and then you can get the mentality where everyone's in it together, and by helping other people out, you're also helping yourself out. Fortunately, I've found the latter to be true in most of my classes.

BoelterHall · 05-01-2008, 01:56 AM

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those of us that tended to get the highest grades in our major worked together on our assignments.

I've never tried this, and I don't see how this works. How is working on groups on individual-based homework effective? I know that if you're stuck on a problem, you can ask someone who might know the answer, but that just makes the homework process faster, not better.

I think by that, you're just tempted to get the answer from someone and move on. There's always a smart person in the study group, and people just feed off that person, in my opinion.

If you help someone, that person might get a higher grade than you. I guess that doesn't help you?

Mr Payne · 05-01-2008, 02:08 AM

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The average was above 1500. His was 1470 after three attempts, though his SAT2's were all 750-800.

CalTech, Harvey Mudd?

Anyways, at the extreme upper end I think it matters less what your score is. At a middling school one definitely sees a bigger range of intellect.

Lacero · 05-01-2008, 02:12 AM

The way I see it, group work is an excellent time management and motivational tool. You always know where youre peers are and what they do to get there, you rarely fall behind.

aibarr · 05-01-2008, 09:37 AM

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I've never tried this, and I don't see how this works. How is working on groups on individual-based homework effective?

Because when you get stuck on a problem on your own, you spend about an hour beating your head against the wall, and you don't really learn anything... You just get frustrated and you think about the same (wrong) process over and over. Eventually, you understand what you were doing wrong, and you feel like an idiot for having wasted all that time on an entirely wrong thought process, and you continue your calcs.

In a group, the time that is spent head-beating is significantly less because when you get stuck, everyone starts throwing out their (wrong) ideas, and while discussing it, all those wrong ideas cause someone to stumble across the right one. In my experience in the harder classes I've taken, it was a different person pretty much every time, so it really was a group effort.

None of us is as smart as all of us.

Seiken · 05-01-2008, 03:20 PM

I would be amused if it were MIT since its on a 5 point scale. Though Stanford then?

Anyways, getting a high GPA is hard, but doable, though its usually worth your time to relax a bit. Anybody got a link to Yuxi (or whoever that Cal kid is with that one facebook group that I cant find)?

Cupola · 05-01-2008, 04:28 PM

Seiken:

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/~zhangyuxi/transcript.htm

OP:

just fyi, med schools will not give you any sort of "compensation points" for majoring in something tough like engineering. If you're really set on med school, why not major in something that's both enjoyable AND easy?

RacinReaver · 05-01-2008, 09:27 PM

Quote:

I've never tried this, and I don't see how this works. How is working on groups on individual-based homework effective? I know that if you're stuck on a problem, you can ask someone who might know the answer, but that just makes the homework process faster, not better.

Like aibarr said above, you don't get stuck on those spots where you can't break your thought process and you get stuck in a rut for a few hours. I spent an hour last night trying to do an integral that I thought was really complex (was going to have to do a crazy contour integral with a whole slew of integrals and whatnot) when I finally gave up and decided to go home for the night. On the walk home, I realized that I could do some algebra to turn it into an integral I learned how to do in Calc 1. If I had been with a group, I probably wouldn't have gotten stuck on that spot, wasted an hour, and gone home earlier than I wanted to.

Also, by making the homework process faster, it lets you spend more time on learning the material more thoroughly. I've had a number of classes where I just didn't have the time I wanted to learn the material, and all I could do was write my homeworks and hope that it all stuck with me.

Quote:

I think by that, you're just tempted to get the answer from someone and move on. There's always a smart person in the study group, and people just feed off that person, in my opinion.

Well, that's something some people fall prey to. If you're in a good group, though, people won't just copy verbatim and will still care about learning the thought process behind what you're doing in the problem.

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If you help someone, that person might get a higher grade than you. I guess that doesn't help you?

When all of you are 3.5+ students, you stop caring. What matters a lot more is learning the material, since that's why you're taking the class in the first place.

Also, keep in mind when you get into the Real World you're going to be working with teams of people. Sure, you'll be alone doing some of your work, but for a lot of time you'll have to be integrating your work with others, so why not start learning how to do that in college?

I actually like the style of one of my classes, where half of the problems assigned are individual and half are collaboration allowed. Makes you think pretty hard about the ones you work on alone, but it allows the professor to making some really f-ing hard problems for the group work.