[icegreentea]

I am currently a systems eng student at UW. Would like to add a bit to your comment. In regards to computer science and the software engineering courses, students are taught specific languages. Nearly all Engineering programs intro to programming courses are in either C++ or C#. Software Eng plays with C and Scheme. CS courses can involve three different languages during the first year, and you're expected to actually know how to use Scheme (for some reason.. this applies to Software Eng as well).

My understanding is that upper year courses are pretty language agnostic. They just want to make sure that lower year students actually have some programming knowledge in a common language, cause when you don't, your coop opportunities are greatly reduced, as any first term mech/civil eng student will tell you.