Miami to Minnesota transfer?

vinceh
Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:21:21 +0000

Earlier in my career we lived in Minnesota for 7 winters; it’s hard to imagine two more different environments. Unless you have lived there you have no sense of the weather. The issue is not snow, it’s snowier in Boston and Chicago than Minneapolis, the issue is the cold. You will have at least 1 week and up to 3 weeks where nighttime lows will be -30 F or colder. There will be days when the high temperatures will not even reach 0 F. In the seven years we lived there my kids never had a snow day, but school was cancelled twice because wind chills reached -60 F; in short, unless you’ve lived it, you don’t know cold like Minnesota cold.

As for the schools, Minnesota is massive, 32,000+ undergrads vs. Miami’s 10,000+. There is something to the concept of “Minnesota Nice”, people are generally friendly but much of the campus population is in-state. Also there is little ethnic diversity, (UMinnesota: 77% White, 9% Asian, 5% Black vs. Miami: 45% White, 23% Hispanic/Latino, 8% Black, 5% Asian).

I can’t speak to the quality of either engineering school, but understand that engineering programs, because of the traditionally rigid nature of their degree tracks tend to feel disconnected from “main” campus - you simply aren’t going to have a Psych major auditing a Fluid Dynamics class. That disconnect increases as you get into upper level classes; I would suspect should you transfer, most, if not all your new friends will be engineers; they simply will be the people you will be interacting with most frequently.

I have no clue what you mean by “the vision” of the school. You have chosen a very specific academic track, your “vision” is the classes you take in order to qualify you to work as an engineer. Your “vision” is what you make it to be. What “vision” do you expect to find/see at another school?

It sounds as though you have decided that Miami is not for you, which is fine, every school is not perfect for everyone. But I’d be concerned about transferring to a school sight unseen especially based on the somewhat vague complaints you have about Miami. The grass may be greener at Minnesota, of course you’re going to have to wait for the snow to melt to see it.