UIUC vs. Tufts for Civil Engineering

hebrewhammer
Fri, 12 May 2017 16:22:59 +0000

@andrea2021, there are pretty large career fairs at Tufts; while I was there I was only ever looking for internships, not full time jobs (I went straight to grad school after). I didn’t find internships in industry for the summers after my freshman (which is rare anyways) or sophomore years but spent both summers working for one of my professors. The summer after my junior year I had two internship offers (I forget if the companies were at the career fairs, had posted through the Tufts portal, or if I applied through other channels) but wound up turning both of them down so that I could spend most of that August in Uganda with Tufts Engineers Without Borders. After my senior year I spent the summer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, who regularly recruit on campus (I think that was how I got hired).

When I was looking for jobs out of grad school I leveraged my Stanford network to a much larger extent, but part of the reason for that is I was mostly looking on the west coast. Most of my friends in engineering at Tufts found jobs coming out of college, I think without too much difficulty. Everyone I know who has gone on to grad school for engineering (either straight from Tufts or after working for a few years) have managed to get into top schools for grad programs (a number of former classmates were at Stanford with me, I also know plenty at MIT, Michigan, UIUC, Georgia Tech, Oxford…).

As I stated earlier, I’m not that familiar with Illinois’s engineering programs (I applied and was accepted for grad school but didn’t end up visiting after I got into Stanford) but my honest (and biased) opinion is that I’d be surprised if it was enough better than Tufts’s engineering to justify going there over Tufts solely for the quality of the engineering. If you want to go to a school in a rural environment, or with tens of thousands of students, or with a big D1 sports emphasis then those are all reasons that could put you over the edge for Illinois. But if you prefer everything else about Tufts then I think the engineering school at Tufts is strong enough to justify going there.