Graduate Engineering Without Engineering Degree

[RacinReaver]

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I’m not going to go and look at the curriculum, but I am certain that every single engineering student in the country must take linear algebra and diff eq. These are both necessary for further work in engineering. For example, using matrices (learned in linear algebra) is imperative for computer modeling. Also, knowing diff eq. is imperative for control volume analysis, which is used in flow problems in chemE.

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<p>Actually, as a materials engineer, I didn’t have to take linear algebra. Neither, to my knowledge, did any of my ECE friends. I did learn about eigenvalues/vectors in my diff eq. course as well as my engineering ones, but I never had to take a class dedicated to its study.</p>

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Onto the comparison between UD and UPenn. It is true that chemE is easily UD’s top program. Everyone at the college, including one of my ENGLISH profs, knows this. However, and this is often a contentious point amongst people on grad school forums, I believe that the difficulty of acceptance is dependent on the school as a whole, rather than the individual strength of the program. For example, Harvard doesn’t have a great engineering program and probably ranks below UD in chemE (at least as far as prestige wise amongst chemE profs). Yet, I imagine that not only is their acceptance rate much lower (Harvard’s is around 13% so I think that’s a good assumption), but also the quality of applicants is higher for Harvard because of the prestige of Harvard as a whole. UD-UPenn is an analogous situation. Most people disagree with this, but I think that despite a specific department’s strength, the people in that department tend to match the general population of a college.

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<p>I’m a Materials Science student at Caltech. There’s no way in hell I’d ever get in here as Physics or Chemistry. Likewise, I have friends that are doing materials science here that were physics and chemistry in undergrad, and they knew they wouldn’t get in to those programs, so they applied under MSE.</p>