Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Date: Nov 17 2017
Major: Nuclear Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
The administration at RPI is what makes it awful. I had extremely bad experiences interacting with the Dean of Students as well as Shirley Ann herself and without going into personal details I can say they absolutely do not care about their students. They are overconfident about their image in the engineering world and without a very generous scholarship I cannot see why anyone would pay the ridiculous amount for tuition. I had a full scholarship and still regret going there.

Folks I work with over the age of 50 think RPI is a great school. Folks under 50 either don't know it or don't think highly of it compared to the schools most of my peers went to (MIT, Purdue, Michigan, Penn State, Georgia Tech, or even NC State).

I've been asked to recruit and interview candidates at career fairs for my very large international technology company and I can tell you that having a degree from RPI really means nothing to anyone outside of upstate NY. We keep lists of schools and departments we are looking for emerging talent from and RPI is definitely not on the list. At first it made me sad, but I went on to get my Masters from Penn State and it really was a far more positive experience.

The classes at RPI were hard, but not impossible. I found that many of the professors had zero experience outside of academia, which really limits their ability to teach you applications you will actually use in your career. Comparatively, at Penn State the academics were far superior and the administrative far more supportive. I only had one issue at Penn State, where a graduation requirement changed when I was half way through the program and the staff at PSU resolved the issue within days and seem to maintain a culture of helping students instead of ignoring or silencing them like they do at RPI.

From now on I tell people I went to Penn State :-)