Hello,
My rising senior thought until now that he was going to engineering. While he is still interested in engineering, he is not so sure about an engineering major as he does not want to work as an engineer. He thinks he may do business.
He has 1450 SAT (trying one more time for 1500+), good GPA, rigor, extracurriculars. We are in Florida so looking for merit aid. What schools should we looking for with strong engineering and business? He prefers an urban or sub urban school, medium to large sized and a community feel. He loved the feel of Rice University.
What budget are you trying to hit?
Has your son considered Industrial Engineering as a major (which combines engineering and business)?
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What is his unweighted gpa?
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FWIW, a large percentage of engineering graduates ultimately end up in non-engineering roles.
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It’s a long list. Many of the tech schools also offer business like Stevens Tech in NJ, RPI in NY, Worcester Tech and MIT in Mass. Lehigh in PA has some interesting programs which combine Engineering and business. Rice with their new undergrad business school is a great choice. Rochester in NY, Villanova in PA, Case Western Reserve in OH, Washington U/St Louis, Tulane in LA, Wake Forest in NC, and Emory in GA are all excellent smaller (5-8000) universities which offer both engineering & business and in that sense are similar to Rice. NYU and Manhattan in NYC offer both as do BU and Northeastern in Boston. I’ve just scratched the surface, leaving out state schools and some very good but less competitive privates.
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The engineering job market
Data gathered by the Washington Post suggests that as many as 75% of those with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees don’t work in their respective fields.
Interestingly my son’s second internship was a non engineering job that wanted an engineer. I asked him why. Answer - they wanted someone who thinks like an engineer.
Bottom line -the degree is not limiting whatsoever.
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We don’t know stats - but start with UF, FSU, UCF, USF - and Alabama.
All that said, what you described - medium to large - isn’t really Rice.
Chasing merit in and of itself means little - you need a budget. Some schools, the Florida publics as an example - are typically cheaper full pay than other schools with merit.
Since you like Rice, how about U Denver - which has big merit - but is $50K-ish ok? At home, you have U Miami. UAH is 10K-ish kids and could be under $20K all in - could, we don’t know stats. Case Western, SMU, Rochester, RPI and more - might fit your desire.
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Unweighted GPA?
Price limit?
Does he have bright futures?
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Most of the Big 10 schools are really stingy with merit aid unless it comes from a named program. In comparison, the SEC gives a LOT more in scholarships based off GPA and SAT/ACT scores.
Also a point of caution regarding engineering and business - in most schools these are 4-year programs with a dedicated set of advisors, curriculum, clubs etc. and it is not easy to transfer majors at all unless you are prepared to start over as a freshman (as compared to transferring within the College of Arts & Sciences). Even smaller private schools like Northwestern have silo’ed off their business and engineering programs.
What a lot of people do in this case, is to take up Industrial and Systems Engineering instead, which in itself is a combination of business and engineering. Here is the list of prominent programs in Industrial Engineering. I would recommend looking at schools like NC State, Virginia Tech or Texas A&M which has a great program but also more merit aid compared to some of the other options on the list.
Not sure that I understand the above highlighted sentence.
Northwestern University’s business school (Kellogg) is a graduate / professional program which primarily awards MBA degrees, but it also offers Masters degree in management.
Northwestern University offers undergraduate certificates through Kellogg for highly qualified students, but NU does not offer an undergraduate business degree or major. Also, NU does not offer merit scholarships to undergraduate students.
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What I meant was that Business and Engineering are typically located in separate schools. In Northwestern’s case Kellogg has no undergrad business program, their consulting major (LOC) is in the School of Education, economics in the Weinberg school, and their engineering program is in the McCormick school.
More generally, this makes it difficult to “transfer” from a business/econ major to engineering or vice versa and oftentimes students may be forced to go through a secondary application process or delay graduation. As such, it may be advisable to pick either pathway before starting college.
Conversely, switching from Biology to International Studies may be easier if both majors are located within the College of Arts & Sciences. This is also true for some schools which have all undergrads under the same college (Harvard/Brown for example) - hence allowing an easier transfer between econ and engineering, if offered
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I agree this is often the case, but in the specific case of Northwestern, transferring between schools is typically straightforward without many hurdles.
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As noted above by another poster, transferring among Northwestern University’s undergraduate schools (there are 6 undergraduate schools if I recall correctly) is easy other than to the School of Music because an audition is required, and the Theater major in the School of Communications as it rarely accepts transfers.
Nevertheless, your perspective is interesting with respect to NU’s SESP and the LOC concentration.
SESP may be one of the best kept secrets in higher education. Small classes, intimate community, sophisticated courses taught at a graduate level. Equal number of undergraduate and graduate students are in SESP (about 300 of each for a total of 600 students).
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Hopefully OP comes back - because we really have nothing but an SAT of 1450.
We don’t know GPA/Rigor
We don’t know budget
We don’t know need qualfiication.
We know they like Medium/Large like Rice - which isn’t large - although I suppose that’s subjective.
So it’s really a debate without having any data to debate about.
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