<p>OK… I’m going to take a stab at this but please understand that it is limited by the experiences and students I have met. Son is a 3-2 student at Thayer. His home school is a SLAC, and in choosing which school to do the engineering (the 2 portion of the 3-2) he had several choices…Columbia, Cal Tech, and Dartmouth were the three. In the end, he obviously chose Dartmouth because their approach to engineering was more in line with his way of learning. It was much more hands on and experiential learning then Columbia for sure, and probably Cal Tech which would be very similar in my opinion to MIT. He is finishing up the first year at Dartmouth and his experience has been wonderful. He has had a chance to do research with a top professor from day 1 (he emailed the prof with his interest and the guy who usually only works with grad students took him on immediately once learning he was also a physics major) His first engineering class involved working with a team, designing a solution to a problem, building a prototype, and putting together a business plan to fund and sell that product. In his second semester he was allowed to take a senior level/grad level course, got along well with the prof who is now helping mentor him for his senior thesis back at his home school. That same prof designed a course for him for this quarter that he and a few (3) of his classmates will take on which involves a lot of design and hands on lab work. These opportunities would simply not be available to him at his home school, or Columbia where the engineering program is more rigid. I can’t really speak to MIT, but that prof that I mentioned got both his Masters and Doctorate at MIT and one of the reasons he felt compelled to allow Son such a wide berth was because it was denied to him as a student. When speaking with him over his spring break son expressed to me that Dartmouth profs and particularly the engineering department have a can do attitude and rather then just say no to a student’s interests and requests, the answers always seem to be “let’s see how can we accomplish that for you!.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, unlike About The Same… I’m not a huge fan of the quarter system. For the record, Stanford also operates on a quarter system. What I see, is a pattern where profs start the quarter off lightly, but things build to a feverish pitch very quickly. In both semesters, there were scrambles to fit in all the course material by the end of the quarter and compared to his SLAC, the depth of the course work was not as deep especially for the material covered towards the end of the quarter. </p>
<p>Overall, I think Thayer has been exceptional albeit slightly different then a traditional engineering school like MIT. I do think the student body at MIT is probably of a higher caliber, but at this level, we’re really splitting hairs. The kids I know that went to MIT were just all amazing each having won Intels, Intl Math competitions etc. </p>
<p>Your friend has great choices, but I would suggest that he go visit all three and see where he feels the most comfortable and not rely on the ramblings of people like myself who post on CC, LOL. Best of luck to him and warm congratulations!</p>