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<p>Uh, really? If so, then why did you reply? </p>
<p>I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you don’t like my posts, then just don’t read them. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. </p>
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<p>I’m not saying that they would ‘magically’ figure it out. If they wanted to learn it, it would take some time. But they could do it. Let’s be perfectly honest. It’s not that hard for somebody with a BA from Rice to just pick up a process control textbook and read it himself in his own time, and then you could ask him questions during the interview to make sure that he really knows the material. Perhaps more succintly, if somebody with a BA from Rice impresses everybody in the interview and can present strong work experience (i.e. internships and co-ops), then he’s probably going to get hired even though he doesn’t have a BS. No employer is going to say “You did fantastic in the interview, your experience is solid, but because you don’t actually have a BS, we’re not going to hire you.” Never happen. </p>
<p>Besides, even having a full BS hardly means that you have “full knowledge” of the field either. Nobody has that. I know people with PhD’s in ChemE from schools such as MIT, and even they would never claim to have “full knowledge” of the field. You can study your whole life and never have full knowledge of the field. </p>
<p>What really matters is not that you have “full knowledge” but that you have sufficient knowledge for the job in question. Let’s be perfectly honest - many (probably most) engineering jobs really aren’t that broad. You don’t really need to have taken a broad range of engineering coursework in order to do those jobs. </p>
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<p>Really? I don’t think I would take a 2nd tier graduate over a Rice BA grad. After all, you said it yourself, the difference between the BA and the BS is only 14 credit hours or so. Hence, it wouldn’t be that hard for that Rice BA guy to learn the material in those ‘missing’ credit hours in his spare time, if he does in fact actually need to know it. Rice is a highly selective school - certainly more selective than the vast majority of 2nd, or frankly, even 1st tier engineering schools out there, which means that a Rice BA grad should be able to learn new material quite quickly. </p>
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<p>And the first thing you should learn as a prospective engineer (or in any career for that matter) is to not rely solely on your school’s Career Services office to find a job. Throughout your entire career, the most reliable way of finding a job, by far, is through networking. Your school’s career office should therefore be seen only as an adjunct tool. </p>
<p>Besides, look at it this way. Out of all of the engineering recruiters in the country - or even in the Houston region - how many of them actually recruit through the Career Services Office at Rice? Probably only a small minority. The vast majority of them will therefore probably not know anything about the BA/BS distinction. And certainly once you leave the Houston area, hardly any employers will know about that distinction at all. Like I said, most employers know next to nothing about any schools that are not local to them. Heck, even many local employers don’t know that much about their own local schools {For example, I continually encounter people in high-level jobs, even in Massachusetts, who don’t know that MIT even has a business school.} </p>
<p>You continually ascribe a level of knowledge about schools to people that they don’t actually have. CC is a highly circumscribed community of people who actually possess an unusually high level of knowledge of schools, and yet even most people on CC were probably surprised to know that Rice offers a BA in engineering until this thread was created. </p>
<p>But I’ll leave that question up to the readers. Of all of you out there who are actual engineers right now, how many of you actually knew that Rice offered a BA in engineering before this thread was started?</p>