When I was at Texaco Chemical, we recruited engineers from Penn State, Georgia Tech, University of Texas, Purdue, University of Missouri-Rolla. (We also recruited all types of engineers except civil fromTexas A&M). There may have been other schools, but these were the most prominent ones that I recall.

Reason 9: The Scotia gamelands Wendigo seldom snatches solo runners off the trail and buries them under the old iron ore sorting bunker

At least 322 is 4 lanes now thru the Lewistown narrows. It was 2 at least thru when I leaned to drive.

Hell, I still remember it being two lanes thru Milroy

A friend at work was just talking about his sons, both going into engineering, choosing between Pitt and PSU. Both leaning PSU as they just revamped and sunk a huge amount of money into their engineering department.

BSME '95, I have a good friend who is BSEE '94.

I haven't been there in many years, so I'll say why I went.

1.a.  It's a big school with name recognition.  A department manager may or may not have heard of Rensselaer Polytechnic, but he's heard of Penn State.  Lehigh was close by - too close, actually, and their music program back then left much to be desired (see #2 below).

1.b. It's a big school with something like 140 majors.  If he decides engineering isn't for him, there's lots of other choices.

1.c.  It's a big school where I was likely to find like-minded people.  (I came from a very small high school - 110 in my graduating class.)

2. Dad was a Music Ed major there and was in the Blue Band.  I was a pretty good instrumentalist, and I wanted to be in also (coming from a very small high school).  If your son is in his high school marching band, this might be very attractive.  Dad made sure our callus visit included watching them rehearse.

3.  MIT was *really* expensive.

My experience:
Freshman engineering classes are designed to weed out those who aren't serious.  They are very fast paced, lots of homework, much of the instruction is by grad students who are usually not very good teachers.  I didn't experience Doc_Zox's junior year stuff; my own experience was that if you made it that far, the faculty was willing to help out.

I should have asked my advisor if I could shift some things around.  Electives, in particular, could have been different.  There's no harm is asking "Can I take this elective even though it's not on the official list?  Here's why:..."

I have no idea about the politics around the College of Engineering.  When I was there, it was not merely apolitical but we were all too busy with our studies to get caught up in "movements".

Electrical Engineering is said to be among the most difficult majors.  The top five, as I heard them (in rough order)

Pure Math
Pure Physics
Electrical Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Biochemistry

Other engineering disciplines plus Chemistry round out the top ten or so.

If I had it to do over again, I would have studied Industrial Engineering.  Every young engineering student dreams of building airplanes or satellites or big machines, but it takes a long time to get to that level (if ever).  What any company can use is someone who knows how to engineer the *processes* they use to make the things.  I sometimes wish I'd studied that.

One other note: unless things have changed a lot, tuition for residents of states other than Pennsylvania is substantially higher than for Pennsylvania residents.

Feel free to IM.

This is College and Atherton looking south

This seems to be a state college thing, flunk out half the engineers.  A friend’s son at SUNY Binghamton had the same experience.  When we did the tour with my son at MIT they said the opposite.  If you get in, we want to keep you.  They say that they want 100% of the incoming class to graduate.  My son was MechE at CMU and while it was hard and plenty of people bailed out they didn’t seem to weed people out just to reduce the numbers.

Also private schools except the Ivys tend to have more merit money for people that can’t get need based aid.  My daughter went to a private school for the same money as SUNY because of merit aid.

They weeded out 50% in 1975 at private Bucknell, too.  It's not really the college, it's students who have no idea how hard the math will be (I certainly didn't).

That being said, over a summer I took Calc IV at CMU (Applied Eng Calc) and that prof was head and shoulders above ANY prof at Bucknell.

Make sure your kid gets as much calculus as possible BEFORE he goes.  I didn't get any in HS and it hurt.

Nowadays, there is a lot of digital logic/SPICE (SPICE does most of the heavy lifting for complex analog circuits that we used to do by hand) which will also be helpful if he gets a head start, but a lot of the power generation/transmission/industrial areas still need the heavy math.

MIT has their course material online if he wants to get a feel.  Might want to check out their CS online materiel as well.

Reason 10: The wealthier Saudi & Samsung undergrads are trust funded $10,000 a month in expense money from their parents. This offsets the budget, if they go to PSU instead of an Ivy league school in Boston or NYC. Several of them spend a chunk of cash on tier 1 hero rifles & pistols. They fire sale the guns when they graduate.

We used to drive across campus and watch for the backwards walking student tour guides

they are obligated to respond to all "We are" cat calls

the psu alumni association is the largest in the galaxy with members in every sector

@fish223

Cool story!

I read each post and appreciate all the information from everyone even if I didn’t quote and comment on your post specifically.  Thank you!

My wife and son visited the school last week and both really loved it.  My son decided last night he wants to go to Penn State and sent in the deposit.

Yes!