The Rochester Institute of Technology

Date: Jan 26 2004
Major: Electrical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
This could be the most depressing place on Earth. Lets get straight to the pros and cons:

Pro: Great and deserved academic reputation. You will probably find a good job if you graduate.

Con: Very difficult to do well - I knew a lot of people on or close to academic suspension. Quarter system is rushed. The school has something like a 25% graduation rate.

Pro: High speed internet.

Con: High speed winds and extreme cold and ice. Walking to class every morning is to be dreaded. Sleep in the academic buildings if you can.

Pro: Food isn't bad. Its cool to say it isnt, but if you sample some other schools' fare its really not bad in comparison.

Con: The campus. Youll love it… if you like bricks. Every building, brick. 80 million bricks. Brick dorms, brick sidewalks, bricks everywhere… and snow and mud. Red brown and white. It all adds up to break you. And Im not talking just aesthetics: the campus was designed to be in Arizona (hot) but is in Rochester (windy and cold). This changes the artificial wind tunnel that you have to walk through to get to class from a good thing into a very, very bad thing. The layout is basically a line: dorms on one end and academic buildings on the other. I think they made it like this to maximize the distance you have to walk to class.

Pro: If youre a girl, theres plenty of single guys and you can probably stop showering and still have 3 or 4 boyfriends. If you have time with all the work, that is.

Con: Social life. Not much to do if you dont have a car except join everyone playing counterstrike. If youre looking for a girlfriend, forget it. Even if you lose all standards, the numbers just don't work. MAYBE if youre an art or photo major. You cant even socialize on your vacations with your friends back home because theyre not synchronized with other colleges that run on a semester system.

Con: Cost. You have to wonder just why it costs them $120,000 to put one student through here when you can go to a comparable private college for less than half of that. Maybe its all going to the multimillion dollar athletic center that is going to go unused by 95% of the student body. Definitely not into much-needed housing.

Con: Big, cold, unfriendly university. Professors are too busy with research to care about students, and too high and mighty to admit flaws in their teaching methods.

Con: Registration. If you want to get a good schedule, you'll have to stay up and try to get a login spot on the VMS system as soon as it opens at like 6am. If you cant login within 30 minutes, likely half of the courses you wanted are filled up.

Pro: Tunnels. Tunnels connect all the dorms and most of the academics. Very nice due to the cold. You can go to the dining halls without going outside.

Con: Tunnels. Dorm and academic tunnels are two seperate systems. So you can't go to class through the tunnels, which is the longest, windiest and most frequent walk students generally make. There are no plans to connect the systems, as far as I know. Actually, there is a cramped utility tunnel running underneath the quarter mile, but it is not very practical for things other than steam or network cables.

Chances are that this place will break you and you will transfer very quickly. If not it will be a painful 5 or 6 years. Do a search for "Liquid X - RIoT Rich.mp3" It offers a mostly accurate portrayal of RIT in just a couple of minutes of song. I only wish I had known all this before I wasted a year of my life here. Don't make the same mistake I did.