Hi! I’m a S.Korean Int’l student.
I am leaning toward one of Purdue Engineering or Olin College of Engineering.
Factors of decision:
-Internship availability(goal is to get ready for an OPT job and then an H1B visa if possible)
-School prestige in the engineering field
-Grad school placement
Price, location, and size really don’t matter to me.
I can’t really decide where to go,
What do you guys think?
p.s.
Full list of accepted universities if u need (All accepted to College of Engineering):
Purdue University
Texas A&M University
Virginia Tech
University of Wisconsin Maddison
University of Maryland College Park
University of California Davis
University of Colorado Boulder
Olin College of Engineering
Both will offer an excellent education.
Olin will be more personal and hands on since it’s their whole system.
Purdue will offer more of everything since it’s bigger.
Both are elite and highly respected but offer very different experiences.
Wrt OPT, contact the international stusent office to know what support you’ll get and what success internationals in the past 5 years have had with OPT. Typically OPT isn’t problematic because it’s automatic.
Forget H1B though - unlike most developed countries the US has no college graduate->work permit->residency pathway… and, worse, in the past 10-15 years, H1B has become a literal lottery so that most companies simply don’t bother.
Finally, discussing your H1B plans is grounds for refusing a student visa since your goal must be to study.
Agree on that. As an employer, it has certainly gotten harder to get behind. We just completed 1, and turned away 3 others. Lots of hidden costs as well… for the lottery. And who should pay those?
These are all equally great engineering schools (your entire list) - but as you are down to two, it’s a size and location thing.
One is small (really small), in the big city. Also, less majors (three that are ABET) although they offer additional concentrations. When I say small, it’s really small. My son interned with an Olin transfer to WPI…I had him ask her…he just said she said it’s extremely small…so you have to want that.
The other is large, in a small town. Will have everything - but does have gpa requirements for majors.
Olin is in Needham, which is a suburb of Boston. It’s much closer to a big city than Purdue is, for sure, but it’s not an urban campus per se. It takes about an hour to get into the city on public transit.
But yes, it is super small. Fewer than 100 students per class year. Purdue Engineering has more than 2800 per class year, just in the engineering school; 9500 per class when counting all undergraduates.
It makes sense, then, that Purdue has more options to specialize; and with their First Year Engineering system, all options are open providing you meet the GPA threshold. Olin is a more integrated, project-based curriculum with only a few major options.
Both amazing schools. Wildly different experiences. It’s all a matter of what you prefer.
One thing to consider is that what’s well-known and respected here in the US doesn’t always correlate with what’s well-known and respected in other parts of the world. Would one degree carry more weight in Korea than the other? Although, if you plan to go to grad school, this won’t matter so much, and either school is more than fine for grad school placement.
Since you were admitted to Olin, did you attend a Candidates’ Weekend? Or (since you’re an international student) did you interview virtually instead of attending CW?
Olin is a unique school and is extremely small (as other posters have mentioned), so the CW process is a great way for both Olin to get to know applicants, and for applicants to get to know Olin. If you didn’t attend CW, perhaps contact Olin and see if they can arrange some kind of virtual visit or video conference with current students so that you can get a better sense of what it’s like. Olin and Purdue are both great, but they will be different experiences and you’ll want to get a sense of that before attending.
Olin is amazing but tiny school. Even people living in Boston do not know it (forget about the rest). In your case, since there is absolutely no guarantee of visa to work in the US after graduation, Perdue will be more known in other countries.
Also consider that some international students find it easier to feel at home if there is a community of students from their country or region at their school. Olin has fewer than 25 international students, total. (So, 6 or so per class year.) I don’t know which countries/regions are represented within that small number. At Purdue, there are over 4000 international undergraduates altogether, of whom more than 400 are from Korea. So, the cohort of international undergrads from Korea at Purdue is larger than the entire student population at Olin.
Olin functions a bit like the Claremonts with Wellesley and Babson - say, HarveyMudd+Scripps+McKenna. So you’re not isolated.
However there is nothing like what you find at huge public campuses and that you may have seen in films or tv shows, no spectator sports activities like going to the game, pregaming, tailgating, wearing the school colors… as would be traditional on an American campus. It’s more like boutique, elite engineering for high-powered future engineers who want lots of hands on projects and personal interactions, while Purdue mixes traditional and elite like top land grant public universities.
Most importantly, you need to email each international student office (services) and ask them information&data (specifics) on the way they support internationals looking for on campus jobs, iff campus internships, and CPT+ success with OPT.