Olin’s appearance in this site may be of interest:
Top students are more likely to complete than the overall average.
1 Like
Yes - I understand - but my point is - even those who complete - that it’s hard.
OP stated this in message one - “We are less convinced that college should be about 4 years of endless work and pressure. We think work/life balance is important.”
While there can be some balance - there’s not a lot - and my point was simply to show - that even for the best students, this is unlikely to be the case in an engineering major.
Counterpoint…my engineering major kid did go to a college where she could also have some fun.
There are plenty of colleges out there with work hard engineering programs that also have other things to do. And other majors.
6 Likes
Ditto!
Not to say that my D didn’t work very hard, but she still had time for theater, hiking, concerts, going to sporting games, a boyfriend, etc…
For the most part she found her courses and projects to be very interesting and she enjoyed her classmates, which made the time studying and working fun too.
4 Likes
If you consider Purdue, here is a link to its Data Digest: https://www.purdue.edu/datadigest/. The links you/your daughter might find especially useful at this point are the “Applications, Admits, and Matriculations” and “New First-Time Beginner Profile”; these interactive sites can provide some comparative information on recent applicants/admits for different colleges within the university, and may allow you/your daughter to get a rough estimate on admission chances.
Also, Michigan (and maybe some of the other schools) will recalculate GPA by discarding all plusses and minuses on the high school transcript – so a B+ becomes a B, an A- becomes an A, and so on.
Generally, Section C7 in the Common Data Set for each school will tell you how the school weighs different academic and non-academic admissions factors. (Not all schools publish a CDS, although I think by federal law the schools are required to keep the information.)
Forgive me if all of this is known to you already.
Lots of great advice in this thread already but I really want to highlight this. When crafting and sorting your list, look beyond the headline numbers and into the discipline/major acceptance rates. Further, and also as noted by others, pay heed to the transfer policies. Not so much out of competitive majors, but into them. At quite a few schools it can be somewhere between extremely difficult and (literally) impossible to transfer into CS or other highly competitive majors. So if not admitted as such it may be a non-starter…and then too it may be tough to enroll in classes if CS majors get priority registration.
Your DD sounds like an excellent student and great kid - and it makes sense that she’s somewhat unclear about what is and is not important to her at this point. I do think you’re doing the right things with visits. It helped crystalize pretty clear preferences for my kids.
Good luck in the journey!
3 Likes
For visual people like me, here’s a chart of how OP’s D has reacted so far:
| Not a fan | Mildly Positive | Loved |
|---|---|---|
| Northwestern | Cornell | Johns Hopkins |
| Rice | MIT | |
| Harvard | U. of Chicago | |
| Princeton | RPI | |
| CMU | ||
| Swarthmore |
If you were to guess she would really have a preference, what would your guesses be?
As I am sure there is excellent college counseling at your D’s private school, they would be best placed to chance your D. But I will provide some guesses so that as you’re thinking about making sure there are some sure things on your D’s list and what kind of balance between more likelies/less likelies would be best for her own mental health, there is at least something to use as an initial rough guide.
Extremely Likely (80-99+%)
-
Clarkson (NY): About 2700 undergrads
-
Iowa State: About 25k undergrads
-
Marquette (WI): About 7500 undergrads
-
Michigan Tech: About 5700 undergrads
-
Missouri S&T: About 5500 undergrads
-
NJIT: About 9k undergrads
-
RIT (NY): About 14k undergrads
-
South Dakota School of Mines: About 2200 undergrads
-
U. at Buffalo (NY): About 21k undergrads
-
U. of Tulsa (OK): About 2600 undergrads
Likely (60-79%)
-
Binghamton (NY): About 14k undergrads
-
Colorado School of Mines: About 5700 undergrads
-
Illinois Institute of Technology: About 3100 undergrads
-
Rose-Hulman (IN): About 2200 undergrads
-
RPI (NY): About 5900 undergrads
-
WPI (MA): About 5200 undergrads
Toss-Up (40-59%)
-
Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ): About 4k undergrads
-
U. of Rochester (NY): About 6800 undergrads
Lower Probability (20-39%)
- Case Western (OH): About 6k undergrads and demonstrated interest is very important here
Low Probability (less than 20%)
-
Cornell (NY): About 16k undergrads
-
Johns Hopkins (MD): About 6k undergrads
-
MIT (MA): About 4700 undergrads
-
U. of Chicago (IL): About 7500 undergrads
3 Likes
I would add Stony Brook to the likely list for OP.
I think Clarkson could be a good fit for her vibe - they do have an awesome career center. But honestly it was tough transportation logistics from Dutchess County. For a NYC homebody it might just be too far from home.
Co-op/experimental learning can be a really great thing. Northeastern in Boston is great for that. It is a big, city school… though surprising “campus-y” at its core considering the urban location. Like Clarkson, she may be toward the top of the class academically. That could be good (less stress) or bad (not challenged).
My son is an Olin College of Engineering graduate. He really loved it. But it is quite hard to get into, and due to it’s teen size (about 85 students/year) it is really a niche-fit school. It only offers engineering degrees, and I would not recommend it for a student that might switch majors. Happily their project-based learning advocacy mission is helping to spread that across many schools.
Harvey Mudd was on top on son’s list for a long time. We visited twice, and he was accepted (though without the slam-dunk stats based scholarship they haduntil prior year). There were so many things that I liked about it being part of Pomona consortium. But be aware it is super intense, with reputation for grade deflation and overworked students. Without name recognition on east coast, there might be trouble finding a job back near home.
Decades ago I was accepted at Case, and it was one of son’s favorite schools. He attended a sleeping bag weekend at CMU and did not like the vibe. But Case was one of his favorites…. nice because he was offered a great scholarship at Case (none at CMU).I think(?) you can still get on a train in NYC and get to Cleveland pretty easily.
I did a lot of research for two kids for engineering, visited schools during vacations (family on East coast). I can answer questions about these schools visited (and many others not visited). Alphabetical vist list:
Cal Tech
Carnegie Mellon
Case
Clarkson
Cornell
CO - CU Boulder, CSU, CO School of Mine
Harvey Mudd
MIT
Northeastern
Olin
Pomona
RPI
SUNY - Binghamton, Albany
Tufts
I have also read good things about Rose Holman, RIT, WPI, Cal Poly SLO, Lehigh, Penn State, Oklahoma (Norman)
Is it too late to shadow or find a summer program for engineering? Might help her deciding on a path or change her path.
Most engineering programs will have a nerdy vibe to some degree. She’ll find her tribe.
Start with ABET accreditation and preferably direct admit programs. Schools strong in Co-ops might be an interest. Good luck.
1 Like
ABET accreditation is important starting point, though I seem to recall there were some small exceptions (?)
Here is a list that I did not know about until after my kids went of to engineering school (one later switched to an Econ major). Would have been helpful - Association of Independent Technical Univerisites https://theaitu.com/
Be sure to know and meet EA deadlines. Engineering is one of those majors that can fill up fast in early rounds. It can also be important to meet EA deadlines for merit eligibility, especially for cohort awards.
2 Likes
It has already been mentioned, but I’ll say that the first school that popped into my head for this student is WPI.
Adding too that both of my s’s are engineers and both made time for fun and well as work. Sure there is a lot of work as an engineering major, but my s’s both started clubs at their schools and were active in other things. Younger s met his now wife in college!
1 Like
Saw this ad in Facebook…. no idea if the resource is any good…
https://engineeringexpectations.lpages.co/ffew-sale/?utm_source=facebook&audience=MO+5%2F8%2F23+|+Ad+Set+3%3A+16C3A+Image+|+40%2BW%2C+US+|+71M+|+Ad+16C3A-+43-52&fbc_id=23853610570290316&h_ad_id=23853610821030316&fbclid=IwAR3qVJc6zjYv6R_G8NuXySRvjgOOnvfQgcM45SbypmJQBUV7hSBB4CGU32s
…. but it does remind me about some factors to think about:
-
engineering curriculum is VERY heavy on the math (my high school “sport” was math team, but I did not love all the calculus involved in engineering coursework - the main thing needed is to survive it, since most jobs at Bachelor level won’t be as math-y as school)
-
engineering has a prescribed course sequence, few electives. Some students don’t mind that, but other are surprised by the lack of flexiblityMost schools have a way to show the “course map” - example Undergraduate Program Map - Mechanical Engineering - Purdue University
-
it is much easier to transfer engineering credits to another major than vice versa. But watch for situations where 2nd choice major has a gpa requirement for transferring in. Engineering is known for grade deflation, especially in Freshman year. So typically unhappy engineering students don’t have a stellar gpa.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. If you’d like to reply, please flag the thread for moderator attention.