How difficult is it to get into Northeastern's honors program?

BillysDad2014
Sat, 13 Oct 2012 08:08:52 +0000

Someone in the parents forum was asking about schools that had good engineering merit aid. I had put in a post there, and re-posting here since it seems to be relevant to this thread…

…Our daughter was 6/400 in HS, 6 APs, SAT math 760, reading 750, writing 740. She got accepted to (with merit shown) NEU ($20K), SU ($12K - top level), UMass (full tuition + $1K), RPI ($10K, then appealed with NEU letter and bumped to $20K), Carnegie Mellon, Lehigh (forgot, sorry, but I think low). Defered early action Princeton, then rejected.

She was heavily leaning towards RPI. Civil Engineering with minor in Architecture. RPI has a combined program that ties the two together (heard from dean at admitte students day and had e-mails with him on details, but hard to find on their web site), and adds 0 tuition masters for 5th year. But she has been in dance since age 3, and there wasn’t much for dance at RPI. She had wanted the classic college campus out of the city, so RPI was a match on that for sure. We almost didn’t go to NEU. But after the 2nd visit during admitted students day we did the usual bookstore tour. She wanted to buy a t-shirt (never happened before), and knew that was the place for her. She got great vibes about the balanced student life (engineering is well represented, but I think it’s just under 20% as opposed to RPI), and even though in the city, it has a 73 acre campus with green areas here and there. She’s in honors, so the International village (new tower, with AC, and other stuff) and absolutely loves NEU (OK, it’s only been about 2 months). One plus (or minus depending on how you look at it), NEU has the co-op program, where you go for 3 6 month co-ops during your undergrad and graduate in 5yrs. They have an accelerated version where if you come in with a decent amount of AP (I think 3-4 courses is OK), you do 2 co-ops and graduate in 5 yrs with a BS and MS. BTW - you don’t pay tuition while on co-op, and co-ops could be local to Boston (you could stay in dorm and pay room/board) or live at home or even abroad while on co-op.

NEU is rising in the rankings overall as shown in their “Institutional Accomplishment” doc, which you can find on top page (neu.edu) under the “About” drop down. Note the rising SAT scores as well. We had seen several students with 2100 SATs overall rejected during the seasonal admittance thread. But RPI and especially Carnegie Mellon (from her choice list) are the next tier up the chain for engineering.