Amongst intls at those unis, yes. I am no great shakes compared to the Alex Chuis, Adavaya Goyals and Warren Beis. Across the cohort though, I probably am great shakes considering that the average MIT student has nothing on the level of olympiads.
Hey @tsbna44, maybe this student doesn’t understand the American culture.
A large amount of University professors worked in restaurants (like pizza places) to fund their educations in undergrad and grad schools. These jobs are respected by admissions committees. It’s a huge EC.
My son’s international peer scholarship students, at Caltech, paid some of their school fees by working in on-campus eateries. Serving food and bussing tables.
Our eldest daughter had an interview at Harvard. They provided a tour with a current student. The student was on scholarship but also needed extra money to handle her off campus fees. She had to get back to her campus job. She was on a cleaning crew, cleaning bathrooms, because it paid better with less hours.
So, OP, bring yourself back down to earth. You may be assigned a campus job that you won’t like, in order to pay your fees. if you don’t pay your fees you can’t register for classes. They block you.
Those of us who needed to pay fees, did a lot of jobs, before, during, and after, that we didn’t like, in order to support our tuition and fees.
If you can’t handle having to work in a restaurant, or cleaning crew, don’t apply to any US university.
Another fun job is working on the other end of the conveyor belt. When the eating hall is a cafeteria, at the end of the meal people take their food tray, with plates and glass and left over food, and put it onto a conveyor belt. The tray disappears down the conveyor belt. There is someone, often a student at the university, at the other end of the conveyor belt. Most of the time you just grab each tray and put the plates and glasses in the appropriate racks (which will then go into the washing machine when full) and put the trays into another stack, which will also be washed. Occasionally however enough people leave at once that you cannot keep up, and the trays and dishes and left over food starts to pile up in a huge messy pile. Then the plates all slide out at once, then the glasses, and so on. It becomes a sport to try to keep up.
When the racks are full someone puts them through the big washing machine. They come out the other end clean and mostly dry (and warm). Someone stacks the clean plates and puts them somewhere. Very, very rarely you drop a stack of clean glass plates. Then you are amazed at how few of them break, and as an engineering student you try to figure out why more of them didn’t break (while still keeping up with the work). My best guess is that the many tiny pieces of the few plates that broke protected the other plates as they landed. I do however still wonder about this particular issue (but this wasn’t at Caltech – maybe the Caltech students could have figured this one out with more clarity).
Caltech and MIT and similar schools do have a way to teach humility in a hurry. You come in with an 800 on the math part of the SAT and having been the best student in math in your high school, and then discover that everyone else is the same (or close) and the classes are tough and there is a LOT of tough homework and the exams are tough. You need to be ready to work very hard for a full 4 years. The desire to do this should come from inside the student themselves.
As someone who is clearly very good math (and proud of it), why do you want to go into aerospace engineering, rather than math or physics? What do you find interesting about aerospace engineering?
Do you specifically want to work gruelling hours as a low level engineer at a place like SpaceX, or would you also find it worthwhile to say, study the chaotic dynamics of trajectory pathing (e.g. https://youtu.be/dhYqflvJMXc?si=acvFuucxwWoAy22M) in academia?
Are you considered a Canadian for OSAPS and UTAPS purposes? If so, you should apply to Toronto and Waterloo. If you’re looking for Caltech level rigor, apply to engineering sciences at Toronto. But depending on your interests, you may also be well served with a physics/math spec.
I would consider applying to CUHK, HKUST, and NTU. They have merit based scholarships and may give you a full tuition/full ride if you do well on the Putnam, but there’s no guarantee.
Have you reached out to d3 field hockey coaches at places like MIT, JHU, Notre Dame, Tufts, URochester, Williams, Amherst? (Amherst and Williams don’t have engineering, but are strong in math and physics and can prepare you for top PhD programs)
Do you have any footage of your performance in national-level field hockey matches?
Notre Dame has a men’s field-hockey club and heavily values athletic prowess in their students. I would recommend you apply.
If you’re cool with academia, then an applied math or physics major would be more appropriate as orbital dynamics can get very mathematical (control theory, chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, etc). Most engineering jobs that you get with only a bachelor’s in aerospace are unlikely to be as mathematically demanding.
Curious why you are asking strangers when you don’t seem at all interested in hearing what people have to say?
I would advise ANY student interested in Aero to major in Mech Eng. Maybe it’s the residual trauma for having worked in Talent management/recruiting in the Aero industry in the 90’s when the bottom fell out of the market. Watching fantastic aero engineers in California trying to get certified to teach HS physics so they could pay their mortgages. Or trying to help experienced and creative project leads retool themselves for the auto industry. Companies were off-shoring at a rapid clip- facilities were moving to India and Malaysia and China and the core teams they needed in the US were less than half of what they used to need.
You cannot predict who will be hiring by the time you are ready to hit the labor market. But having a broad set of skills- with two or three aero courses under your belt and an independent study with your favorite professors- gives you a lot of optionality down the road.
