How do you find out about the teaching approach

[Miss Marple]

of a certain college/university? I've been reading up on Tennessee Tech's Chemical Engineering program and see that they offer a more hands-on approach than perhaps other colleges. But how do I find out about those other colleges? If they don't specifically say something on their website about "hands-on" are there some cue words that I should be looking for?

 

Some websites are very sketchy and others have a lot of information. How do I find out which other schools might have a similar approach as TTech? I don't really want to e-mail all the ChemE programs around the nation :tongue_smilie:.

 

TTech has had good publicity on WTM forums and it seems like something that would appeal to my ds#3, but the problem is the distance from home as well as the lack of a local (or even nearby <90 miles) airport. So I would like to check out schools closer to home, but I'm rather disappointed because I had high hopes for TTech based on the reviews here. But Ds#3 isn't so keen on not being able to come home frequently.:001_huh:

 

Any advice is appreciated - as always :D

[Nan in Mass]

My sons go to a hands-on college. They toss that word around a little bit, but mostly the evidence is in the class titles and in the internships that are required every year. What about coop programs? The engineering programs I looked at for my son had a flowchart for each major. It is usually online deep down in someplace. If you look at the titles of the classes, you might get some indication of how many of them are projects or labs. How many credits are assigned each class? If it varies all over the place, that is an indication that there is something more complicated than plugging through textbooks going on. Some colleges talk about capstone projects. If the semesters are organized in an unusual way, I would suspect that they might be more hands-on. It seemed as though the ones that were hands-on had a tendency to structure the learning into a more hands-on friendly format. Are there short-terms scattered here and there? Is each student assigned a project advisor?

 

Those are some of the things we noticed when we were looking.

-Nan

[TravelingChris]

I am finding out by reading both college guides (the ones that have descriptive passages about many schools, not the ones that just have stats) and by going on websites. For engineering, which we will start looking in earnest in a few years, we are looking at which colleges have hands on learning as a portion of what is necessary. There are a number of engineering schools that focus on that.

 

For my senior who is looking at colleges now, she is interested in mainly discussion classes (unless she decides to major in economics), and schools which depend more on papers and less on exams. Particularly, she is wanting to stay away from schools that have hard multiple choice exams on minutiea in the texts. That is what my dh's advanced military tests where like and it is a really stupid way to test.

[Miss Marple]

So, maybe those of us looking for "hands-on" engineering schools could post the names when we find them - pretty please?

 

Ds#3 won't graduate until 2013 so I have a bit of time. But I think he will be the hardest because I want to find just the right fit for him. The others will do well wherever they go, but ds#3 marches to a different drummer entirely.;)