Utah State University

Date: Oct 11 2011
Major: Engineering Department (This Major's Salary over time)
In the mechanical engineering department the undergraduate program is broken into two phases; pre-professional engineering and professional engineering. When you are a freshman and sophomore you are considered to be in the pre-professional program. You then apply to get into the professional program your junior and senior year. So far in the pre-professional program I have observed that practical and hands-on understanding does not matter here. If you are good at reading text books and regurgitating the information on a test then this is the the place for you. If you are a hands-on and/or a visual learner then avoid research universities. The faculty here do not care about your success, in fact, one math teacher I have had said that a 71% CLASS AVERAGE on his last exam was "acceptable". Why is almost failing acceptable? (yes, the math department, who cares nothing about application of math, teaches engineering students how to do their math). The college of engineering recently increased the minimum GPA for admittance into the professional program to all B's and only one C in ONLY math, science, and engineering classes. Generals and non-applicable classes do not count towards or against the GPA requirement. While this is good if you do poorly in generals, it is not good if you need those generals to help you out. The reason for this is due to the lack of teachers. They need some way to "discourage" (according to a faculty member who will remain anonymous) students from taking engineering classes because the university lacks funding to hire more teachers. All the while the university is building two multi-million dollar buildings right now!! My advice is for you to evaluate your learning style and avoid research based universities if you are a visual, hands-on learner.