Undergraduate experience, opportunities, overall educational environment?

dad15
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:16:53 +0000

Thank you for your helpful replies. That is some great context. My son, for now at least, seems pretty committed to doing MSE for college and has been for some time now. It was a primary criterion to rule colleges in or out as far as where to apply. I liked Oregon State as well but there was no MSE major available there, so he didn’t apply. Your son’s observation about some of the EECS students is quite valuable. I can see how what might be true for a subset of students in one prominent, large engineering department may not be reflective of other departments of the college as a whole. Another factor I had brought up earlier about the hard-rank based grading in the lower level classes may have been a legacy from decades ago. I noticed you can pull the grade distributions for these classes at Cal online now and based on per class per semester data that type of grading appears to no longer be effect or is not nearly as strict as it used to be at least for the classes I remember.

It’s great and imo a sign of a relatively inclusive atmosphere that your son was able to get into EE and MECHE dominated clubs right away as a freshman MSE major. Perhaps the ultra-competitive clubs thing is another primarily CS issue.

There are many good reasons for a 1st year student not to join a research lab, but has your son noted whether this seems to be an issue for second year and above students that desire it in this department?

For the CA schools as others pointed out above we won’t find out whether any of this matters until the end of March. There is not a small chance of going 0 for CA so obsessions over Cal vs CalPoly vs Davis vs Riverside vs Minnesota for example are premature. My son has been accepted at many of his OOS options, they are all in play financially, some compete favorably with CalPoly in-state and we will know the status of most or all of the rest in the next couple of months. So we are making plans to visit at least some of the OOS acceptances in the next couple of months before we know the March results. What provoked this thread is that time for making a decision feels like it is shrinking rapidly and will accelerate when we reach April. I also think the information you have given me about your son’s early experience at Cal MSE vs EECS is something that will not necessarily be obvious from a campus visit.

Already, when we get down to the nitty gritty of curriculum and classes offered and required there are significant differences between these institutions even though they are all ABET accredited. For example, Cal, CalPoly, Washington St., perhaps Iowa state and the private schools, compare favorably vs the others (IMO) because they all give exposure to at least one core class in the major in the first year. Another aspect we are considering is that MSE is a very broad discipline, I think you are better off in a larger department to get broader exposure to more of the field. Although relative to other engineering departments MSE always tends to be small, some in fact may be too small (looking at you Davis, Riverside, the reason Merced was not applied to), offering limited upper division electives for undergrads or a very narrow a department focus. And yet another aspect is major pre-reqs some programs (i.e. Cal, Minnesota) require modern physics, some (i.e. UCLA, CalPoly) don’t. So, does this imply the upper division MSE classes cover content to different levels of depth at the different schools? Even the core math classes required in different departments seem to have some variance beyond 1 variable Calc. Sorry for the rant about things you already know, it’s just a fair amount of information to integrate in addition to the more generic college stuff like housing etc… If you think some of this stuff is minutia that is not really worth considering in the grander scheme of things, I would welcome the counterpoint.