<p>as the title says… which is the best university to study Aeronautical Engineering?</p>
<ol>
<li>Massachusetts Inst. of Technology<br></li>
<li>Georgia Institute of Technology</li>
<li>University of MichiganAnn Arbor</li>
</ol>
<p>according to usnews</p>
<p>You can try these two websites:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/eng/brief/engsp01_brief.php[/url]”>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/eng/brief/engsp01_brief.php</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/engineering/nophd/enns01_brief.php[/url]”>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/engineering/nophd/enns01_brief.php</a></p>
<p>Note that the first link is graduate schools while the second link is undergraduate schools. </p>
<p>But that’s just USnews’ opinion. I personally don’t trust them that much.</p>
<p>Edit: I’m not sure about the second link, since it says (At schools whose highest degree is a bachelor’s or master’s).</p>
<p>I was seriously considering studying aerospace engineering, but decided to switch to electrical after doing some work at a robotics lab. My top choices at that point were MIT, Stanford, and Caltech. Caltech has an aeronautics concentration within the engineering and applied sciences option. You might also want to consider the research opportunities you’d have at Caltech given its association with JPL. </p>
<p>-Oren</p>
<p>You could also consider the faculty interaction that you could get with a 3:1 faculty-to-student ratio at Caltech. Finally, you’ll find that graduate rankings aren’t necessarily the same as undergrad rankings.</p>
<p>Caltech’s aero department has a major focus on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); also, explosions, thanks to Joe Shepard (who rocks)</p>
<p>Hey, what about Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach?</p>
<p>Embry Riddle is the number one Aero Eng. school that does not offer doctorates according to Us News. </p>
<p>From what I can tell from local reputation (I live in Orlando) Embry-Riddle is good at Aero Eng but virtually nothing else. I wouldn’t even begin to put in the same category as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT.</p>
<p>Yes, agreed. I know it’s not in the same league as the “Big Three,” but I inferred from ricksyr’s enquiry that he was asking about undergraduate education.<br>
I have to stick up for Riddle (my brother is there): the students there are great, many have their own 'planes, and the courses seem rigorous. True, if you want to study anything other than Aero Eng., Riddle is so not the place to go, but then you should be clued in by the university’s name – it is Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Engineering University, after all! Lotsa ROTC, decent balance between work and social life, and the weather is not at all bad. However, depending on your “interests,” the male/female ratio may be less than ideal…</p>
<p>I had a nice long reply to this thread, which got lost before I was able to complete it and hit “post.” So I’ll only post a summary of what I had:</p>
<p>I do agree with the US News grad rankings that MIT, Caltech, and Stanford are THE three schools for aeronautics. I personally prefer to look at grad school rankings than to look at undergrad rankings, especially for fields such as aeronautics that tend to be very graduate-level-focused. (Many graduate aeronautics programs assume that the students have an undergraduate background in mechanical engineering, since aeronautics is very much an advanced extension of mechanical engineering to fluids.)</p>
<p>Undergraduate aeronautics at Caltech is unique in at least two different ways. First of all, the aero program at Caltech is not tightly structured at the undergrad level but is focused primarily on the grad level. In my opinion, this could be bad, but it could also be good, and here’s why: if all you do is take classes and leave Tech with a B.S. in Aero, then you may not get too much out of the academics. However, if you seek out opportunities to do research in aero, then you will find at your disposal all the tools that the grad students in Aero have here. Just to throw out an example, for several months I had Caltech’s largest and newest wind tunnel, the Lucas Adaptive Tunnel, exclusively reserved for my research use. Granted, I probably ran into a lot of luck to get such a privilege, but so far as I can tell, such a thing will never happen elsewhere. It seems like those who are comparatively indifferent about academics don’t get much out an undergrad aero degree (which is the case for any major, really), but I know at least a couple aero fanatics who get more than they bargain for, just because of all the research opportunities that exist within the grad-focused Aero department.</p>
<p>The second difference between Caltech and the other schools is that, like just about every other subject here, the courses and the research are quite focused on theory and less so on application. This didn’t use to be the case–the 10-foot wind tunnel, which served Caltech from several decades ago until roughly 2001, was THE wind tunnel that all the aircraft companies, big and small, would go to to test their planes. In the last few decades, however, there was a shift in focus from a mix of practical and theoretical aeronautics to more theoretical aeronautics and to astronautics. As mentioned above, GALCIT (the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratores of the California Institute of Technology, the Aero department of Tech) likes to do stuff with computational fluid dynamics, turbulence and vortical flows, and other stuff related to pure fluid mechanics; also, it has taken an interest in doing stuff related with space, although that may be more of a Jet Propulsion Lab thing than an on-campus thing. I’m pretty sure that MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics program is more applied than Tech’s; I’m not sure about Stanford, although I’ve heard rumors that Stanford’s program is pretty theoretical as well.</p>
<p>I’m an aero fanatic myself, so I’m willing to answer more questions about this topic.</p>
<p>G2sus4m6aug11b15, Add me to your buddy list so we can PM each other, i do have a few questions</p>