RPI worth the debt?

notrichenough
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:31:38 +0000

Things have changed a lot since I was there, as you might expect. They’ve built on every spare scrap of land, and the cost has gotten ridiculous (like most other private schools). I was able to pay more than half of the total cost of my four years just from my summer jobs. Those days are long gone. I think there are more girls there now, which is good; %age of girls when I was there was less than 20%.

The drinking age was 18 for everything. You could buy beer on tap in the basement of the union. $1 got you a 22 oz draft Molson Golden, 80 cents for the cheap stuff. And the bars all had regular $1 drink nights. Drinking was very popular.

My parents dropped me off, helped carry my stuff up (very small pile compared to most kids these days), and then left. They didn’t step foot back on campus until I graduated. There was no parent orientation, student orientation was around half a day. Any kid whose parents who hung around too long, or god forbid their mom cleaned the room or whatever was branded a mama’s boy and never lived it down. I figured out all my own transportation to/from school (400 mile trip), arranged all my own off-campus apartments, picked all my classes, etc, with zero input or help from my parents. Definitely a different time than today.

Not all the changes have been positive in my view, though. The new policy requiring students to stay in the dorms for 2 years is outrageous, and is a blind money grab, IMO. The dorms and meal plans are horribly overpriced, especially the dorms. I lived in Hall Hall as a freshmen, and it hasn’t changed a whole lot in 30 years - it is still a characterless pile of bricks and cinder blocks, only now it costs close to 10X what I paid.

And I am not a big fan of President Jackson. While she has done a decent job fund-raising and increasing the endowment, her pay is out of control (she is the highest paid university president in the country, at a school of 5000 students), and the perqs are nuts. Bodyguards? Multiple houses? A 19,000 square foot president’s residence? And there is too much emphasis on trophy buildings. A $200 million PAC? I think a perfectly reasonable one could have been had for $50 million, no disrespect to Curtis Priem, who is a nice guy (I played in the orchestra with him).

You should be upset too, you are paying for it.

Post-graduation - RPI has an excellent reputation in the NE for turning out competent engineers; I don’t know about other areas of the country, I’ve always been in the NE since graduating. I had four job offers upon graduation, and except for a stretch around 2003 when everything around here went to he!!, employment opportunities have been fine. I’ve remained technical for the bulk of my career, because that’s what I like. We’ll see how that works out when I hit my 50’s.

All of my friends that I keep in touch with have had good careers, most are still involved in engineering in one way or another.

Advice for freshman:

Schoolwork is like pancakes.

Every class your professor will give you a pancake or two. If you eat them right away when they are warm and fresh, they taste yummy and go down easy. And it is not hard to eat all the pancakes you get in a day.

Sometimes students put the pancakes in their backpack, and don’t get to them until the weekend. They are cold, and a little stale by that point, but you can usually put them down with a little time, although you might feel a little nauseous when you are done.

Occasionally, though, students leave the pancakes in their backpack for weeks or even months. Now they are all crumbled and moldy, and that pile is mighty big. You will be up all night choking them down, and keeping them down could be a problem.

Moral - eat your pancakes every day.

If you read this far, thanks for letting me ramble.