Chemical Engineering - need thoughts regarding a disappointing visit

rainh2o
Tue, 18 Nov 2014 19:36:16 +0000

DD and I made the 6 hour trip to Tuscaloosa a couple of weeks ago for our first campus visit to UA. For most of the day, she was in love with everything about the university. The campus itself is gorgeous, we had great meetings with the Honors College and a Greek ambassador, and DD was so excited that she was talking about making her enrollment deposit and housing application.

Our last meeting was with a faculty member from the Chemical Engineering department, and it totally changed our perspective (not for the better). Everything about the meeting was negative…he said there are very limited undergrad research opportunities due to the small faculty size & the ones they do have are highly competitive, that she needs to stay in her home state if she was interested in medical school, that they don’t have very many engineering electives, that internships are a thing of the past and employers only want co-op experience, that he’s not a fan of the STEM/MBA program, that he disagreed with some advice that the Dean had given a potential student who was also in our same meeting, and that DD might want to stay with a couple of her other school choices or consider UAB if she wanted a biomedical/biological focus.

She was so disappointed after the meeting. Can anyone who is familiar with the chemical engineering program give me some insight? I certainly don’t want her to end up at a school that’s not right for her (regardless of how amazingly lovely the campus is :), but I would hate for her to rule out UA based upon that one encounter if maybe things aren’t quite as bleak as he made it out to be.