Top East Engineering Colleges?

sakky
Thu, 04 May 2006 20:43:57 +0000

Yes it has a name, but to me thats all it had. I saw a lot more in a school just down the road, and I think Im getting a much better, more personal education. (and a lot of MIT’s profs left there to come here… .)



Even if MIT had only a big name, for many people, that’s the whole point. There’s nothing wrong with that - that’s just good hard-nosed career development there. A lot of people choose to work for high prestige employers like Goldman Sachs or Google just because they know that doing so looks good on the resume for whatever they want to do later in their careers. I don’t see anything at all wrong with wanting to gloss up your resume by inputting a big name onto it. Everybody wants that. Prestige has value.

Where the problem comes is when people chase prestige at the exclusion of everything else. That, I agree, is a problem. But that’s a far cry from saying that prestige has no value at all. Prestige increases your chances of getting noticed by future hiring managers. Prestige increases your cachet with future investors and future clients. For example, if you are starting your own company and you need VC money, it’s good to be able to say that you have an MIT background to impress the moneybags. Olin College may be just as good from a quality standpoint, but the moneybags probably don’t know that.