Rose Hulman 2014 -who did you turn down

redfedora711
Sat, 17 Apr 2010 01:40:50 +0000

@roderick

Alright. One of my reach schools and possibly #1 for me was Harvey Mudd. I applied there as an Early Decision II applicant and got rejected. (Stats aren’t good enough)
The one thing that stuck out to me when I visited Mudd was their close-knit environment. One of my friends suggested me to check out Rose-Hulman because it had a similar atmosphere other than the fact that they tied with Mudd on the USNWR. From that I applied to Mudd on mid-Feb and got my acceptance letter from them two weeks later.

At the end of March, I had basically received all my acceptance letters from the UCs , CalStates and the Out of States I applied to.
I eliminated the lower UCs and CalStates I applied to…leaving only the flagship ones of my list left.
Drexel was essentially a free application for me so I just did it for the sake of having another option although I really didn’t have much of an interest in it.

After narrowing things down…I got it all down to

UC San Diego
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

During my spring break, I took time to visit all three universities to grasp a feel of the atmosphere, student life and academics.

With UCSD, I didn’t like how people were situated in 350-capacity lecture halls for most general classes that were designed to weed people out. Talk about highly impersonal. Our tour guide gave us all sorts of facts about UCSD getting in the rankings for research and development as well as its events, but it really didn’t seem like I was able to find real enthusiasm for the college (or at least not in its students…and that’s a bad thing). Whatever was presented was much more convincing to my asian parents than me. (after all, I am the one going to university and not them.) Financially, I did not receive any sort of aid from UCSD…so it would cost me 30k a year here and considering engineers take typically 5 years here from what i’ve heard…Hello 150k out of the bank.

With CalPoly, I did like how the classes were smaller and the hands-on focus to undergraduate education opposed to the theoretical focus at UCSD. However, I heard lots of things about the CPE classes weeding out around 70% of the people that apply for the CPE major. Not only that, it takes many people 5-6 years to fully graduate. I went there for their multi-cultural overnight program and had lots of fun with college parties there. However, I really thought that I’d be tempted to go to the parties over doing my work and get weeded out anyways. The people here did seem more amiable opposed to UCSD. Financially, this place was considerably cheaper. I got a 1500 dollar scholarship from CPSLO. Overall cost would be ( 110-132k over 5-6 years)

Now with RHIT. I visited the campus during one of its campus days and immediately found the friendliness and the close-knittedness of the students to be rather appealing. People seemed extremely amiable here and it really felt like an environment where everyone was geared towards academic success by working together whether it’d be through study groups or what not. I spoke with one of the CS professors and he was very kind to answer my questions, but also pleased that I walked in and had questions to ask to begin with. I didn’t get a name of the professor but he was really encouraging. I talked to several other professors/department chairs and they all seemed to have the general attitude of “if you’ve been accepted…we truly believe you can succeed as long as you put your heart into your work” instead of the typical “you’re going to get weeded out…might as well just get out of here already” attitude from some much larger institutions. I think that’s what really got me. The support structure consisting of both the students and faculty really seems to allow one to not only feel like an important part of the university, but allows one to discover their full potential and dreams. I think what Rose-Hulman does shines in its high 83-84% graduation rate compared to the national 40% graduation rate in engineering schools. [That comparison (in the social and academic context) can probably be used to judge Harvey Mudd and Olin College as similarly also.]

Financially for Rose…I was offered 11k as merit aid per year and assuming that each year would cost an average of 37k a year (excluding laptop cost and after merit scholarship)… It would put out around 148k out of the bank.

When I looked at the costs , academic quality and social aspects if each university…it came down to a couple factors…

The most important being the environment in which I can be successful and feel like I fit in. RHIT essentially took that spot. Additionally, it wasn’t that much more compared to the in-state universities that offered me virtually no aid. I felt like I would be getting my bang for the buck at RHIT too.