<p>I am between, maryland, wisconsin, and illinois, and plan on majoring in chemical engineering. Maryland would be much cheaper for me to attend. But it seems like the two other schools have much stronger chem e programs. how is the maryland chem e program?</p>
<p>In general, Maryland’s engineering program is strong and is quite demanding. I assume this includes all their programs, which would include chem e. “Much cheaper” may be enough to tip the scales to UMD. Although you have to take it very lightly, how do the various rankings show the 3 schools comparing? If UMD was not ranked at all, and the other 2 were high, it might be “worth it” to head to the midwest.</p>
<p>Another consideration is whether you expect to go to graduate school to accomplish what you want. If so, getting good grades and landing useful internships/research while you are at UMD would put you in the running for any grad school.</p>
<p>this leads me to my next question, what do rankings actually mean?</p>
<p>There are all kinds of threads arguing about how the rankings aren’t to be believed… it’s something to grasp at, in terms of finding some objective way to compare, but I certainly would never recommend that one’s entire decision should be driven by that.</p>
<p>One thing you could do is to go into depth on each school’s online catalog and identify the courses that you would need to take to complete the major. How many faculty teach in this area at each one? Can you look at the other schools to see if all the courses you would need to take are taught each semester? Because these are all large public universities, I suspect you will not find a lot of difference between them…your decision will probably be more based on logistics of travel to the other universities to/from home…neither Madison nor Urbana/Champaign are as easy to travel to by air…there are limited commuter flights from Chicago (or perhaps Milwaukee or Detroit for Madison?) Don’t underestimate the time, hassle, and cost of that. And, what do you want to have around you…lots of corn and soybean fields in Illinois, lots of dairy farms and rural scenery in Wisconsin, or the proximity to DC from UMD? I do think that UMD would have more opportunities to do research or internships while you are taking classes than either of the other two…there’s just so many more options close to you.</p>
<p>i got into Carnegie Mellon, didn’t think I would, now what?</p>
<p>Congrats! I don’t know what your FA status is, but it would be difficult to justify the price difference if you are full-pay, IMO. I’m biased towards UMD, though–obviously. My only experience with CMU is with one of D1’s high school classmates who made it clear how much more superior he thought CMU (and he) was than UMD (and D1). You’ll need input from unbiased people on this one, sorry!!!</p>
<p>hmm thanks for the input, obviously the price difference is big but I have a good feeling that I will get enough FA from CMU…that being said pros and cons anyone?</p>