Best Aeronautical Engineering Schools

boneh3ad
Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:16:08 +0000

anonemuss:

Well their main concern is that the quality of students isn’t as high as other schools. At my school, people who don’t really care about school get into A&M easily and my parents fear that the quality of students isn’t as high as other schools.



That’s a semi-legitimate concern in general, but it doesn’t really ring true here, necessarily. The quality of the engineering students at TAMU and UT are not substantially different, especially in aerospace. I say it is only semi-legitimate if it was true is because while there are advantages to being surrounded by stronger students, ultimately, college is what you make of it and you certainly don’t need that to get a good education, a good job, or have a good experience.



anonemuss:

Also, College Station is like in the middle of nowhere isn’t it? It’s not like UT which is in Austin, a big city, as well as GT which is in Atlanta. Purdue is in West Lafayette, but they aren’t really a top choice for me though.



College Station is certainly (in my opinion) not as great a place as Austin, true. I wouldn’t call it the middle of nowhere though. There are some 236,000 people living in the Bryan/College Station area, which is some 54,000 more than in the area surrounding Purdue. Now, if you really are just interested in going to school in a larger city, then that is totally legitimate and then really something to consider here.

Ultimately, you will likely perform better in school if you are happy, so if being in a larger city will make you happier, it is definitely something to think about. That does rule out a lot of good aerospace programs, however. We’ve already discussed Texas A&M and Purdue, but also consider Michigan (Ann Arbor: 344,000), Illinois (Champaign: 231,000), Cornell (Ithaca: 101,000), Colorado (Boulder: 294,000), Virginia Tech (Blacksburg: 159,000), Penn State (State College: 153,000) and so on. Basically, aerospace engineering programs tend to be at state flagship universities that have the resources to administer such a program, and those schools tend to be land-grant universities, and lang-grant universities tend to be located in “college towns.” It is fine to prefer a major city, just keep in mind that it will be limiting.



anonemuss:

Also, the reason i’m hesitant about UT and TAMU is that i REALLY don’t want to go to school with people from my high school. My school sends approx 500 kids to UT and even more to TAMU (class size 1500), and that scares me as to the amount of kids that i might have to share classes with. My school is full of obnoxious asians who only care about grades so yeah, you can see why i got tired of them easily.



So your high school graduating class sends over 2/3 of its students to the combination of UT and TAMU? I am sorry but I call BS on that. Not only is that a very high college attendance rate without even factoring in other universities, but that also represents over 5% of the freshman class at Texas A&M from your high school alone. That is an exaggeration.

That said, I completely understand the desire to go somewhere away from your high school classmates. Keep in mind, though, that both of those schools have over 50,000 students, so even with a large number of high school classmates also attending, it is quite easy to avoid them entirely.



anonemuss:

I looked at the recruiters for other schools, and i saw that Rolls Royce is based in Indianapolis (close to Purdue), Delta is in Atlanta (GT), and Wichita State is in the “Air Capital of the World”, so there are a myriad of companies based there. It’s nice to know that there are some Boeing facilities in Texas, but the competition must be fierce since you mentioned the instate students are a lot.



You are missing the point a bit here. Essentially every school that has been discussed so far has a national recruiting footprint, especially in aerospace where the jobs are concentrated in a handful of dense pockets around the country (Southern California, Texas, Florida, Seattle, DC, St. Louis, etc). Having previously worked for Rolls-Royce, for example, there were plenty of Purdue graduates there, but there were graduates from all over: Illinois, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Maryland, UCLA, Berkeley, Texas A&M, Texas, and so on. These schools produce engineers that are highly sought-after nationwide. It is nice to have some companies nearby, but especially in aerospace, it doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the employment potential of a given school’s graduates.