I chose Clarkson over Cornell.  It was the right school, for me.

There is no THE best school, for any specialty, but there may well be a THE best school, for you.  Clarkson has grown a lot since my time there, but it's still a small school, where you won't get lost in a crowd.

But that was forty plus years ago, when Clarkson had the only student accessible computer in the whole world, and computer engineering didn't exist as a specialty.  Now "computer engineering" covers several distinct specialties ... and in forty years it may not exist, having been subsumed by something else or evolved in directions we can't predict now.  

Which brings me to my second point.  Don't specialize any more than you have to.  You could very well end up doing something that you haven't learned about yet, or something that doesn't exist now.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

Thanks for the advice! So is it silly for me to even look for the most highly respected school? It makes a lot of sense to look for the one that's best for me.

Also, would you say computer engineering is too narrow a field of specialization, or are you referring to branches within the computer world, such as "network engineering" for example?

Thanks again!

Nick

"Computer engineering" now may refer to software design at the system, application, or firmware level, or hardware design, at the system, network, meta-network, or firmware level ... or atomic physics, or molecular chemistry, or plastics, or metalworking, or physico- chemical processing, or all of the above, and more.

I.e., a _lot_ of engineering goes into making and applying computers ... but some coursework that's advertised as computer engineering may be too specialized to allow you to make a living when the next inflection point arrives.

A slightly contrived example:  Suppose you had just graduated with a degree in producing floppy diskette drives.  Could you find work?  Maybe, but probably not producing floppy drives.

To expand on that, if you learn all there is to know about how to design computers as they exist today, what will you do in ten years, when they're made of micromechanical machines, or molecules, or atoms, or plants, or ... something else?

Better, I suggest, to learn how to apply the laws of physics to _any_ problem ... and to know how to learn the new laws as they are discovered.  

Take the hard math and the hard physics, and sample some other stuff you haven't tried.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

Thanks again for all your advise. It will definitely help me.

I too am in the same boat, and have even gone as far as looking at foreign schools. At this point, I'm highly intrigued by National Chiao Tung Univeristy in Taiwan. If you're willing to learn mandarin chinese, it only makes sense to go to school there since a lot of computer parts are made there. Just IMO.

It really depends on what your grades look like and what your SATs, etc. look like.  Are you good enough to go to MIT or Caltech or Berkeley or Stanford?  

Why only shoot for local schools?  Find a school that will give you a rock-solid foundation.  That will set you up to do just about anything.

TTFN

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The University of Nebraska has a good program actually in Omaha.  They have all new labs/equipment, and it might be worth checking out.  

http://ceen.unomaha.edu/