Delete MIT, Insert Olin?

The parent's perspective goes on ... We've visited three schools in the past three days. Life is different from when I chose Dartmouth (and they chose me) back in the Spring of 1974. Last night in our Super 8 Motel near Iowa City, I looked over and realized Erik was leading three different Google Chats on the laptop. One conversation was with a friend who had just visited MIT and RPI ... they were comparing notes.

Some of the comments ...

• These schools are big, like cities ... cool labs.
• You don't get to do engineering work Freshmen year  ...  class size can be HUGE.
• Valpo, however was smaller and cool ... neat robots, visualization lab

Here is where life gets interesting. In my prior post, I mentioned that Erik had learned about WPI's robotics program via the NXT Blog.  Well ... that blog learned of Erik's quest, and  linked / posted. My blog stats show tons of referrals back to this blog.

In addition, a freshman from the Olin School of Engineering stumbled upon my first posting, and emailed me. Erik and I checked out Olin's web site ast night, and given our experiences at the "big" schools, it looks like we will delete MIT from our visit list, and check out Olin instead. Check out Olin's student blog. It appears Olin has a unique approach to engineering education.

We finished our evening with a call home ... via the phone ... no! ... Skype!

Comments

[Marco]

Olin is amazing! :) Interestingly enough, I'm an Olin student and was looking for another olin student's blog when I found this. I'd never heard of Valpo, and only recently found out about Cooper Union. And "similarly enough," among the schools I applied to are: WPI, Carnegie Mellon, Olin and MIT... which have all been on your son's list. All good schools :)

[Esther Massimini]

If he's an urban kid, try the Cooper Union in NYC. http://www.cooper.edu/ My hubby's alma mater for his MS and oh yeah, FREE. And has a woman dean, so you know it won't be a run of the mill eng school. Small school but big $$. And Greenwich Village.

BTW I am going through the same adventure, for the second time. Daughter is pre-law at Univ of AZ and we spent most of our travels in California. Son is into chef'ing and we are visiting the 'big' Hotel Mgmt schools (Cornell, U Denver, Johnson and Wales, Northern Arizona U, and Univ of Paris Hilton's Grand daddy -- Univ of Houston) So much for the progeny of two engineers becoming engineers, LOL.

[John Hunter]

Olin is doing some very interesting things, I have posted about them before:

http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2006/05/25/improving-engineering-education/

Plus it is free: "All admitted students who enroll at Olin College receive an Olin Scholarship covering tuition during the four years of the baccalaureate program. This scholarship is currently valued at approximately $130,000." all students get full scholarships.