I have a lot of credits already. At a public university I have enough credits to enter with academic junior status. I think there will be room in my schedule to explore elective classes. A minor is computer science, math or psychology sounds interesting to me.
I meant to mention that I think this describes Stanford and Cal better. I don’t think it describes Caltech.
I have to agree with @NiceUnparticularMan: advice:
I forgot to mention my husband is a graduate of Stanford engineering. He experienced Caltech through his father and our son. When I asked my husband why he didn’t attend Caltech for undergrad, or grad school, he said that he found that there was a limit to the variety of courses that Caltech could provide. The variety of coursework at Stanford was just much more attractive than Caltech’s.
My husband had a great experience at Stanford. It was more of a community than what you would expect even though it’s much much larger than Caltech.
The diversity of students from every country and rural, urban, suburban, communities is represented well at Stanford and everyone tends to come together because they are so diverse everyone is curious about everyone else.
Plus, he really got to know his engineering cohorts at one of the eating clubs. Also, each of the themes of the dorms at Stanford displays the “community level”.
I think what you’ve described is more descriptive of Stanford than Caltech.
I think I agree with the posters that have reiterated about your tribe: the minute you get into an engineering department, at your university, is when you will discover that everyone is just as passionate about the major as you are. It’s not particular to one individual school. Making assumptions About an individual school is going to lead you to huge disappointment.
I know that right now all the kids are wearing sweatshirts to schools where they were admitted. Please don’t make this about a prestige hunt, which is beginning to sound like it. Please make this about a place that will educate you and will be a good, happy experience for you. It’s going to be very expensive for your parents if you go to a place that doesn’t meet all of your needs and You don’t like it
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But do they get useful subject credit or allow for advanced placement? For example, AP physics 1 and 2 get no subject credit for engineering majors who need calculus based physics. In some cases, the school may give credits for an AP 3, but only give subject credit useful to you for a 5 or 4.
Caltech and Harvey Mudd generally require students to take their own placement tests for advanced placement, rather than using AP scores or other typical sources of credit earned while in high school.
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@Sylvester3, I hope you pay attention to @aunt_bea’s excellent advice. Caltech is a special place, but I don’t see it as good value for your money if you’re pursuing mechanical engineering, want a good community, want to explore interests, and you:
I repeat again: mechanical engineering is not a brand conscious industry. You will find yourself working alongside plenty of grads from public flagships, and they’ll be right there alongside the Stanford and Ivy grads.
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I personally do not idolize the prestige of these schools and am fine with the public education of California. However, I am surrounded by a lot of people who do, who think its worth the education despite a lot of debt. I am trying to ascertain how much the prestige actually matters, and what are other benefits and pro’s of these schools beside the reputation. Especially with Harvey Mudd and Caltech, with such a small undergrad population, it has been hard to find student accounts of the experiences, whereas there are so many videos all about Cal Poly.
In fact, in my experience most of the people most fervent about the value of famous, highly selective colleges did not actually attend one. Those who did attend such a college are at least somewhat likely to have a pretty balanced views on the subject. Because they have seen the reality and not just the dream.
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You’re hearing from a lot of people who know (professional engineers and others) who are saying the prestige doesn’t matter. The one engineer I worked with who was actually let go based on performance went to MIT. His boss didn’t care one whit what was on his diploma. As an engineer, it’s what you do that matters.
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And many of us (who have engineering degrees) have addressed that here on this thread.
As another data point: one of my friend’s son graduated from Penn State last year and got his dream job at GE Aerospace, where he discovered that his colleagues have degrees from all kinds of schools*. No one cares! They all passed a rigorous technical screening and interview to demonstrate their knowledge, and now they’re on an equal footing.
(* both Ivy+ and others; and in mechanical engineering circles many public flagships are just as “elite”)
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Sample of one…my husband. He had a very very successful career as an engineer graduating from a tier five (do those exist because that probably is where his undergrad school is) university. The engineering program, however, was abet accredited and highly regarded by many firms in the area in which we reside. My husband became a vice president of his company, and worked on many many very high level projects in his career.
He thanks his lowly ranked abet accredited engineering program for enabling him to have this very successful and financially rewarding career.
And he had no undergrad debt, which was a gift we appreciated many times in our married life.
That being said, he recognizes the strength of places like Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech, and Stanford. They do turn out very good grads. BUT is it worth it to have a ton of debt? Probably not. $40,000 of debt for all four years…that would have been doable for us.
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I don’t wish to hijack this thread away from OP, but I was wondering if I could ask @aunt_bea to elaborate a bit about this characterization of campus life. I’m a little startled, as the overall impression my family has been getting is that, despite the “drinking from a firehose” reputation, the students tend to work collaboratively and the campus environment is open and friendly. Could I ask how many years ago your son was at Caltech? Thanks so much.
To be clear, my DS24 was admitted to Caltech REA, and he is more interested in graduate school and research than industry at this point. He’s CS, though, not MechE. He’s still waiting for a couple RD decisions and to attend admitted students days (including DiscoTech) to make a decision on where he’s headed.
We saw this too. It is absolutely open and friendly and the freshmen tend to work collaboratively on problem sets. It’s a beautiful campus and the professors know their topics. I am not saying that it isn’t a phenomenal school because it is. It’s just that this type of school suits students who are self driven and are okay with spending hours developing their own solutions in an independent manner.
Our son chose it over a rare free ride at UCLA and he was admitted reg decision at Stanford. He was attracted to the degrees that could be merged if he wanted more specificity.
It is a research institution so there’s pressure to perform beyond a regular college environment. These are internal and intrinsic pressures. Once your son begins working on his major, his focus will be his research. These students thrive on independence and their rates of productivity are amazing but it can get lonely.
Our son was popular there. He was well-liked and a good student but he came from a large high school and felt, somewhat confined. He has worked with start-ups developing code and programs but wanted something different? He had some reprieve in volunteering, later, as a math and EE tutor across the street at PCC.
I think he started attending ~9 years ago. He’s had several classmates visit our home occasionally and keeps in contact with them. We’re in SoCal so we get a lot of visitors. He also socializes with a former classmate, who is now working on a Ph.D at UCLA, also math major.
(His first year roommate is constantly in contact.)
The school was just not a good fit. Square peg, round hole. It’s a research institution.
Thank you so much for the additional information which is great to have. It sounds as if your son found where he was meant to be in the end. My son looked at Caltech and thought it would be a good fit for him but wants to attend DiscoTech to try to make sure. We’re hoping that three days on campus will give him some clarity.
Well I hope the three days will help him. Note: The intensity starts when classes start.
I also struggled to find student accounts of the experiences. My student is now a sophomore at Harvey Mudd. Since both Harvey Mudd and Caltech are small and the students are very busy in school, it makes sense that you’re not going to find first-person experience accounts because those students just don’t have the time to do that. I can share my perspective as a parent of a HMC student though.
My kid went through the college application process planning on a mechanical engineering major and applied as such. As mentioned in prior comments, HMC does not have a mechanical engineering major per se, it only has general engineering and then you pick the electives that concentrate in a certain area. That was acceptable to my kid but may not be to you, so you might consider looking more into the course descriptions to see how that looks compared to other schools.
Now as a sophomore in college, my kid has decided to major in CS instead despite never having had any CS classes or hobbies in high school (our HS had an engineering focus program that my kid did during HS). At HMC you don’t declare a major at the beginning, you have until end of sophomore year because all the kids take the same core classes for the first two years. However, my kid found that when mapping out the four years of classes for engineering you pretty much have to decide on engineering toward the end of first year in order to set up a manageable schedule for the remaining years.
All classes and recitations are taught by professors, not TAs. Almost the entire undergraduate class lives on (the small) campus so forming study groups and having social time together is very easy to arrange. And since it’s part of the 5Cs, the campus can be much bigger according to your interests. My kid has gotten very involved in various aspects of campus life (working, tutoring, dorms, research, clubs, etc.) and I attribute a good part of that to the small size of the school. Sure you can get involved in any size school and that should be an essential part of the college experience, but for my kid who probably would have faded into the faceless crowd in a big school, I think this small school experience really has helped to create a supportive space for that. It’s not competitive in the sense of trying to do better than someone else but competitive in the sense that students are self-motivated to do their best and are competing against themselves. The overarching vibe at the school is that of support and collaboration, and the first thing my kid would say when asked about what they like about HMC is how nice everybody is from students to staff and faculty.
It is expensive and we were fortunate to have saved up enough that there will be no debt for undergrad. If you have to look at it strictly based on financial numbers, it would be hard to say HMC is worth paying more than your in-state choices for engineering. You will get no credit for any of your AP (or DE) classes. But for us, so far it’s been worth it for our only child to flourish in a place where they found their people quickly and don’t experience discrimination or snobbishness.
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Exactly! They just don’t have the time. Their time is spent on campus projects. Once they graduate, they move onto other research facilities or grad schools.
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Caltech is very, very, very, very much a fit school. @aunt_bea I found myself nodding in agreement when reading your post. I did not attend this school and my kid did not apply, but I know a few people who attended (one as a grad student) and it didn’t turn out to be as much of a fit for any of them as they had hoped. Even for the grad student who was (of course) very research focused. But I know that some students find their perfect fit there.
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@tamagotchi: I agree that you have to truly fit Caltech. I think a number of students are swayed and are basing their opinions on the prestige of the name, ranking of the school, and the beauty of the campus but not, the ideology of “research” as the primary driver of their educational system.
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Thank you, we’ll take that under advisement! There was an interesting article in the student paper about last year’s DiscoTech where some undergrads were wary about the school potentially trying to gloss over the intensity. In the end, the consensus was that Caltech represented this aspect as fairly as it could. Honestly, I hope the current students will be frank about it with the protofrosh. But my son also wants to see how the overall size of the school feels and how the school is socially, which I know you pointed out can be an issue. Plus, hopefully having the chance to interact with the CS department directly.
Well, you have to get into these schools first. This is a better convo to have once you have options.
What do you want to do with your degree? You can pretty much do very well with a ME degree from any of the schools you have been accepted into. If you want to get a PhD and do research, you can still do that after attending those other schools but it is likely that you will be miles ahead if you went to Stanford or Caltech.
One more thing, most kids that go into competitive engineering programs often start as sophomores. Some even start as juniors. My kid is ChemE at Alabama. He is very thankful that he can take 13-14 hours of credit per semester to manage the workload and still hope to graduate on time because of all the AP/DE classes he completed as a HS student. He has a full tuition scholarship so he could in theory take as many classes he wants to. Just something to think about.
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It’s good to have all of this info now. I’m with OP that the decision timeline makes it hard to wait to start investigating these issues. My son also has two solid EA offers from public schools with strong CS departments - we will be attending an admitted students day for one later this week - but is still waiting for a couple RD decisions. He loves Caltech but wants to find a school where he will be happy. Determining best fit before actually attending the school is always the challenge.
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