Quote:
Originally Posted by Trent B
I will just counter the large schools one with this.
I go to Iowa State University a school with 25,000 undergraduates. I am one of about 150 Materials Engineers on campus. You can't look at the size of a school to generalize either, you have to do in depth analysis of the program.
You know what they say about what happens when you assume.
Maybe I am overly defensive but ISU's Mat E program is one of the better programs in the country and we have the most engineering grad students at ISU. The student to faculty ratio in Mat E is 6:1, pretty crazy for a state school of 25,000 and we also have things like Ames Lab and the Center for Non-destructive Evaluation. You cannot base anything on a single statistic.
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Your point? Unless the Material Engineering program is completely isolated from the rest of the university, or any program at any school, to generalize, the first year or two at the majority of schools is going to be spent taking basic, general courses with the rest of the first/second year class, with some exceptions. This thread is about how certain schools have such low graduation rates after 4-6 years, and the retention rate after the first year directly affects that number; I don't think I have to say that if you can survive the first two years just fine, you're probably going to graduate within 4-6. Never did I refer to the quality of different programs at small versus large schools, I was instead referring to how at smaller schools (which includes both small state schools and large schools that have split off departments that rarely interact), it's much easier to get help when you need it and talk to others, rather than just getting by without truly understanding the classes.
I never mentioned specifics in my post because it's impossible to have the time to point out every single specific instance of where some schools do it right and others do it wrong. If your's happens to do it right by making sure most students can transition to the more demanding curriculum within the first two years, props for it.
The number of grad students is completely irrelevant to what I was saying, unless they all happen to be TA's and working with all undergraduates.