Will a Columbia Engineering degree help me get admitted at every Ivy Engineering grad school?

juillet
Sun, 06 Apr 2014 16:18:00 +0000

Assuming that you do get a graduate degree in engineering, you want it to be from the best place for you and your interests (research-wise or professionally) and with the most funding. Going to an Ivy may be important to you now at 18, but as you grow and come to know your field better hopefully it will diminish in importance to you (and Stanford and MIT aren’t Ivy League schools. It’s just an athletic conference). In fact, some of the top places in engineering are public institutions - like Michigan, several UCs, UIUC, Georgia Tech, Maryland, Purdue, and Minnesota.

With that said, I think you’re confused. Think about HS -> college. Just like a student from any high school in the country could get into Columbia from undergrad, a student from any college in the country could get into a top engineering program for grad school. But, the kids who go to the top high schools are more likely to get into the top colleges because 1) they were more likely to have been raised from birth by two college-educated parents with the expectation that they will go, and 2) they are more likely to have access to the kinds of things - APs and organized sports and other extracurricular clubs and science fair support and college counselors who will help with essays and lists - that will help them gain admission to these top schools. It’s not like the admissions office just looks at their school name and says “Ooh, Andover, shiny!” They say “We know Andover has a good rigorous curriculum, and this student is also very accomplished.”

It works similarly with grad school. Coming from Columbia, your admissions committee may recognize that Columbia has a rigorous engineering curriculum, but they’re not going to be as impressed with it as someone off the street. It’s just one tick in your favor, and not necessarily a very big tick. What’s really important is what you do there and whether you take advantage of the resources that you DO have access to. Top school students are overrepresented at top programs in large part because they were the ones most likely to have wanted to go to grad school anyway.

So to answer your questions: Yes, an engineering degree from Columbia is good enough to get you into a top engineering program for a grad degree. It can also be the basis from which you go to a top business school, although what’s really important there is your leadership and work experience. There are thousands of Ivy League kids every year who apply to MBA programs at Harvard and Yale; you have to have something more to be one of the few who gets in.

Also, last note…my advice is don’t pick your graduate school when you’re 17-18, and don’t focus on a particular set of them yet. You don’t even really know what you’re interested in within engineering, and you may very well change your major. Stay focused on doing well in school and getting internship experience, and then in junior year start thinking about what you might like to do next.