The Rochester Institute of Technology

Date: Jul 16 2005
Major: Electrical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
Another recent commont confirms exactly the reasons I decided to stop going here. I will add that in the electrical engineering department, the few classes I took emphasised cranking numbers on paper and in the calculator over understanding important electrical concepts. Since the school will accept just about anyone to get a few quarters of tuition out of them, they don't want to make the work impossible for people who don't truly have the engineering spirit. Instead, any hard working person can crank the frequent but non-challenging homework out. This frustrated me. I would spend more time doing my homework if I felt it was something that would benefit my test grade, but instead it is usually just a mandatory aspect of your grade. The best professor I had collected the homework to see how much effort you were putting in, but never counted it towards your final grade. The bottom line is, not everyone learns the same way and if professors don't give the opportunity for students to prove that they've learned something and instead dock them points for pedantic reasons, it is simply intolerable.

The stories of the social life are true for the people that would have issues in the first place. It is true that just like in prison, you can always make friends. The problem is that a few too many people are ok with just sitting in their rooms, and there aren't enough crazy party types to convince the lazy types (like myself) to leave their room and have some fun. For me, this was a problem. If you are not shy and you are the one leading the crowd, you will not have a problem.

Between the high dropout rate (because of the pointlessly high acceptance rate) and the co-op system, it makes it hard to really make GOOD friends. Sure, I had acquaintances in a a few classes, but when you're only going to class for 10 weeks at a time its tough to figure out who the interesting people in clas are. Then, bam, 10 weeks of co-op and you don't even see the people around and by the time you come back they're on co-op and its even longer. Basically, the beginning of every quarter is like starting from square one as far as trying to form a social group. Once again, if you are an outgoing person, it is likely that you can meet people you like, but if you're not its tough to feel really comfortable around anybody.

If there is one thing I will say, they do an excellent job at trying to keep you as the student support specialists in the engineering department were very helpful for me, but it got to a point where they pretty much agreed that there was nothing they could do about my complaints regarding the school.

If you are thinking about going here but not sure what the engineering mentality entails, you can probably do a lot of work and get a degree. If you know engineering means designing and implementing solutions to real problems, you will be disappointed when you find out that even 3rd year students do not get to test their abilities at solving problems that aren't hugely contrived.

I'm going to bust my butt to try to get into MIT. Between its extremely competitive admissions and its top rated education, I'm sure I could be succesful if I went there.