<p>Here is actually a list of companies that Northwestern actively coordinates co-ops with: [Walter</a> P. Murphy Cooperative Engineering Education Program - Northwestern University](<a href=“Academics | Northwestern Engineering”>Academics | Northwestern Engineering)</p>
<p>A brief look will turn up companies like Raytheon, Motorola, NASA, Autodesk, GE, GM (you could probably be the CEO after a few months of co-oping). I think you’ll get the same quality companies at both Northwestern and Carnegie. Chicago is a major hub for companies, you have a lot of management and industry based out of the midwest for some of those big companies. What drew me to Northwestern moreso than Carnegie or JHU is that Northwestern has a reputation of turning out both engineering and business savvy undergrads. So naturally the large midwest companies recruit for their management positions and industrial engineering positions from Northwestern. From that recruiting aspect, you can put NU up there with MIT.</p>
<p>No argument, CMU has a fantastic computer and electrical engineering program, which turns out more and better research than Northwestern’s does. However, you will see a lot of theoretical, robotics engineering coming out of Carnegie. Hence the robot that rolls on a ball - that’s nice and all - but what applications can you find for it? Northwestern tends to pride itself on training engineers who can find real world applications for their products. So you’ll see way more specifically designed medical robots and flexible solar cells. While the engineering research itself isn’t as prominent and is way more in the nitty, gritty, it’s probably more useful overall.</p>
<p>I also liked Northwestern’s curriculum way more than JHU or CMU’s. While I wasn’t exactly happy about NU’s research, I figured that I’d be spending way more time actually working on engineering class work than doing research, so first and foremost I should be happy with what will be taking up the majority of my time.</p>
<p>If you got into the CMU electrical/ computer engineering program (which is a very prestigious and difficult program to get into) I would suggest looking at that. However I think the question you want to ask yourself is, do you want to build robots and do more theoretical research with more future implications or are you aspiring to possibly managing and looking at the real world side of things. Obviously there is no right answer, you have to go with what you think. In the end I liked Northwestern’s real-life applications approach and decided to go with that. </p>
<p>Good luck with your decision.</p>