<p>i personally would goto stanford, they have good grade inflation, good sports programs, lively atmosphere, top programs in everything.</p>
<p>jeffl, What schools have you applied to?</p>
<p>If applied to most of the top schools and have my fingers crossed.
My first choice would be Stanford</p>
<p>Taking other things into consideration, I’ll say Stanford without a doubt</p>
<p>California weather, well-rounded education, and extremely prestigious.</p>
<p>It is simply CA’s Harvard</p>
<p>serious just go to the one where you think youd have the most fun</p>
<p>u can never go wrong with either of them.but strictly speaking i think MIT has a slight edge over all.it is called “the ultimate engineering school” or “total engineering school”.Caltech is more theoretical,while the others are good in terms of application.But as i said,whichever u choose,its good enough</p>
<p>Caltech is most likely the hardest.</p>
<p>You know, folk, over at the Yale board, there’s a thread called “Yale Engineering”, and on post #19, someone wrote:</p>
<p>“In terms of research per student/professor quality, Yale actually has the strongest engineering program in the country, just above Stanford in fact.”</p>
<p>Pretty funny, no?</p>
<p>ive applied to all of them, have been rejected to stanford ea already.</p>
<p>I’d also take Stanford over the rest, since it has great grade inflation, weather, and prestige.</p>
<p>About Yale Engineering, I think its true. Their program is small so the faculty/student ratio is insanely good. Personally, I’d go with Yale engineering over MIT/Berk/Caltech since there’s more to the undergrad than just engineering.</p>
<p>But for graduate school and employment, a lot of it depends on the name of the school. Yale engineering has little renown, if any.</p>
<p>Stanford engineering is clearly the most well-rounded program. And considering their dominant CS department, engineers have plenty to keep themselves busy with. MIT isn’t any better than Stanford besides the name itself (which only has more cache on the East Coast), which means a lot less at the undergraduate level.</p>
<p>its possible some people dont know stanford.but talk of MIT and people look at u with awe.</p>
<p>if it was up to me and i got into all, i’d pick stanford for sure, the students there are probably the most balanced, you’ll meet a lot of all around successful people.</p>
<p>grade inflation is great</p>
<p>RETHEEM, Who on earth doesn’t know Stanford</p>
<p>It is true , in terms of engineering, that MIT is more famous , but as a name Stanford is just next to Harvard</p>
<p>MIT, Caltech and GaTech are great schools but are still technical schools, not universites</p>
<p>The great all-around universities include Stanford, Berkeley, UM (ann arbor), Princton, UIUC (Illinois@ Urbana) and Carnegie Mellon</p>
<p>Most of these are public (except Stanford, Princton and CMU) which means being cheaper </p>
<p>but in terms of prestige its Princeton and Stanford</p>
<p>If you’re looking for a job in engineering California is your place and if you’re a technie (EE, COE, CS) you should seriously consider Silicon Valley , which has Stanford (in its middle) and Berkeley (close enough)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, at least in terms of employment, the truth is, even people from no-name engineering schools do quite well for themselves. For example, you can search for my old posts where I showed that even engineers from Montana Tech, Michigan Tech, and New Mexico Tech do quite well for themselves, with starting salaries and job placements that are quite comparable to that of the elite engineering schools. Yale engineering may not be the equal of MIT, but it’s gotta be better than those no-name schools. </p>
<p>It gets back to something I’ve been saying a lot on this thread - elite engineering schools don’t help you that much in terms of getting a normal engineering job. I agree that it can help you get an elite engineering job, like a job at Google. It can also help you get into a better engineering grad program (if you want that). But if you just want to get a regular engineering job, then there is little difference between the top eng programs and the non-top programs, or if you don’t want to pursue engineering after undergrad, then Yale is perfectly fine. For example, if you plan to go to law/med/business school or want to go into consulting or banking after undergrad, then Yale is at least as good as Stanford, MIT and Princeton and is arguably better than UIUC, CMU, and Michigan. Lots of engineers from the top schools leave engineering for those other career paths. As detailed by the latest Time Magazine article “Are we losing our edge?/Is America flunking science”, lots of people leave engineering for consulting/banking, even guys from MIT. As the article said, why make 50k as an engineer when you can make 60k+bonus as a consultant? And the truth is, if you are chasing consulting/banking, the prestige of your overall school is far more important than what you major in. McKinsey is far more likely to hire a Harvard Art History major than a business major at a no-name school.</p>
<p>major from a no-name school … "</p>
<p>That is probably true, in my personal opinion. But McKinsey is also probably far more likely to hire a Yale history major than an engineer from Yale … The point is that McKinsey looks for smart people, and at Yale they are more likely to be in the history department, where Yale is very strong, than an engineering department, where Yale is not as highly rated in (as in, say, the US News rankings).</p>
<p>I don’t know that the undergrads in Yale history are going to be smarter than the undergrads in Yale engineering. I think the point is that they’re Yalies, and that’s what matters most in this context.</p>
<p>“MIT, Caltech and GaTech are great schools but are still technical schools, not universites”</p>
<p><em>eyes well up with tears</em></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is a highly highly dubious assumption in my opinion. You are presuming that strong students tend to gravitate towards top ranked departments and weaker students will tend to gravitate towards lower-ranked departments. </p>
<p>From what I have seen, stronger students tend to gravitate towards higher-PAYING departments, regardless of ranking. It is almost certainly true that Yale engineering students get paid higher starting salaries, on average, than do Yale history students. After all, Princeton also has a highly ranked history department, yet Princeton history students get paid less than does the average engineer nationwide. Yale’s engineering is not as good as MIT’s, but it is still clearly better than the average engineering program.</p>
<p><a href=“http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/data/surveys/CareerSurveyReport2005.html[/url]”>http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/data/surveys/CareerSurveyReport2005.html</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/15/pf/college/starting_salaries/[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/15/pf/college/starting_salaries/</a></p>
<p>Hence, Yale students who are cognizant of money (i.e. they don’t come from a rich family) may choose to major in engineering if, for no other reason, than to lock in a relatively high starting salary. Your starting salary is influenced far more by what you major in than in what school you go to. Plenty of Princeton graduates wind up with quite mediocre starting salaries, depending on what they majored in.</p>
<p>Furthermore, you are assuming that weaker departments means a less demanding workload. This is a highly dubious assumption. As we all know, Yale still has its share of rich legacy students who know full well that they are going to get hooked up by their rich families once they graduate. Yale had even more such students in the past, but it still has a good number of them today. Given that lack of motivation, why don’t more of these students choose to major in engineering at Yale, if engineering is so easy? For example, George Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean have all confessed to being rather lazy and desultory college students while at Yale. They basically went to Yale not because they really wanted to learn anything, but just because it was considered the normal thing to do in their social stratum, and they were just there to pick up their degrees while doing as little work as possible. Basically, Yale was nothing more than a finishing school for them. </p>
<p>So if engineering was an easy major at Yale, why didn’t those guys major in it? After all, these guys weren’t really interested in academics. They were just trying to slide by. We all know that Bush was basically a drunk frat boy while at Yale, who has often times laughed at his C average. Kerry has publicly admitted that he was more interested in learning how to fly planes than in his Yale studies, and he actually ended up with (slightly) worse overall grades than Bush. Dean wasn’t exactly the most conscientious student either while at Yale. Yet what did they get their degrees in? Kerry and Dean majored in Political Science, one of Yale’s top departments. And George W. Bush majored in, you guessed it, History. </p>
<p>So you really have to ask just how rigorous the Yale History department is if George Bush, a notoriously lazy and drunken frat boy as a student, could have been awarded a Yale History degree, or how rigorous the Yale Poli Sci department is if they conferred degrees upon 2 highly unmotivated students like John Kerry or Howard Dean. </p>
<p>I’ll give you another example. I know a number of people who got undergrad engineering degrees from no-name schools like the University of Rhode Island, University of Maine, UMass-Lowell, and places like that, who are now in the MBA programs at HBS or the MITSloan School. They have all invariably said that the difficulty of their MBA studies cannot compare to the difficulty of their undergrad engineering program. Yet HBS and MITSloan are 2 of the finest MBA programs in the world. Despite that, the truth is, MBA programs are pretty academically unrigorous in the sense that it is practically impossible to flunk out of them. The hardest part is simply getting in, but once you’re in, as long as you put in a bare minimum of effort, you’re going to graduate. You might get only barely-passing grades, but you’re going to pass and you’re going to graduate. Furthermore, I would point out that HBS and Sloan are arguably 2 of the most rigorous B-schools out there, so most other B-schools are probably worse. It’s hard to get very top grades at those schools, but it is not hard at all to simply pass. However, undergrad engineering programs really will flunk you out, even if you do the work. </p>
<p>I would agree that the Yale PhD programs in History would probably attract students who are a cut above the Yale Engineering PhD programs would. This is chiefly because of the separate admissions processes. The very best History PhD candidates in the world will apply to Yale, but this is not true of the best Engineering PhD candidates, and obviously for PhD programs, the History applicants are not competing against the Engineering applicants (which is the case in undergrad admissions). But for undergrad? I highly doubt that you can say that one group of students is more capable than another. Again, how hard can Yale History really be if a self-admittedly extremely lazy and irresponsible student like George Bush can manage to pass?</p>
<p>And if those fellows happened to major in engineering while in college, do you think they would have received degrees in it?</p>
<p>Sakky, you misread my post. I made no such assumption. I suppose it could be misinterpreted that way, but you, hm, jumped the gun assuming that I am taking up a running argument you have been carrying out with some other people on this board for ages. Well, there may be some superficial resemblance, don’t get me mixed up in that argument! (By and large, I actually agree with you on that one.)</p>
<p>I freely admit that I do not speak for McKinsey – hence the use of the word “probably”. On the other hand, I did not assume this up out of thin air either. My statement comes from actual personal observation.</p>
<p>I do not speak for ALL Wall Street firms, but there ARE groups on Wall Street that actually know the top schools quite well. Just as admissions offices at some top colleges know very well the best high schools in the country – Andover, Stuyvesant, IMSA – these groups know some of the top colleges down to the rigor of their majors, even sometimes to the difficulty of specific courses and to the professors who teach them. For them, a top history major from Yale means something for an opening where they are looking for general skills, but when they look for openings requiring quantitative rigor, they look at MIT or Stanford engineering. It is not the case that all Yale engineers are presumed stupid and all MIT engineers are smart, but there is a basic level of comfort with an MIT engineer and you start the hiring process from there, while with a Yale engineer there is a burden of proof. Once the Yale engineer goes to MIT for a PhD (and some are good enough for that), or Harvard or Chicago for an MBA, or has superior work experience, that burden of proof disappears. There are many candidates clamoring for positions on Wall Street, and the signaling mechanism studied by game theorists actually works.</p>
<p>(So, DRab, yes, not all people get jobs on Wall Street just because they sport a Yale degree. It is more complicated than that. The people from the Ivy League know that there are smart people from the Ivy League, and dumb ones.)</p>
<p>(Sakky: in reference to Bush, or to whatever major Kerry was, I did not imply ALL Yale history majors are smart. Be careful with quantifiers!)</p>
<p>In my over-ten-year experience on Wall Street, I have come across many Yale graduates, but none with engineering backgrounds. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but they SEEM scarce to me. Engineers from MIT, yes, Princeton, yes, Stanford, yes, even Harvard, yes, but from Yale, it is mostly the humanities majors. My sampling my be idiosyncratic, but I don’t accept that the dearth of Yale engineers comes from the small size of Yale engineering. Caltech is small, too, but Caltech graduates seem to be very well represented on Wall Street, and they represent Caltech well too.</p>
<p>Going back to the original topic, as far as Wall Street is concerned, credentials from either of those four engineering schools – Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley – are very highly regarded, and they place you at top of the heap when you look for a job that requires analytical rigor on Wall Street.</p>