Why choose RH over RPI or WPI?

nic767
Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:44:38 +0000

What deb said is true. In general students are conservative, but it’s not that overwhelming of a trend. There are a few zealots who join the College Democrats and Republicans, but most of the rest of us are too focused on school and enjoying our free time to concern ourselves with politics. I can’t remember ever having a political conversation or confrontation with anyone on campus. Sure, you’re not going to find many hippies holding war protests outside the administration offices, but that’s because those hippies have calculus at 8 o’clock, physics at 10, and a chem lab all afternoon.

It goes along with the whole treating everyone else like adults thing that we do here at Rose. You can have your beliefs, but you won’t win many fans handing out fliers in the dorms or something advocating some political issue. I don’t recall there being any real tension here on campus around the midterm elections. The College Democrats and Republicans had a debate, so the opportunity for advocacy is there, but it’s not really prevalent.

When you say Greek, I assume you’re talking about fraternities? In that case, what deb said is also true. Roughly half our population is in a fraternity of some sort (many of them are professional fraternities, such as AXE, a fraternity for chemists and ChemE’s and anyone interested in chemistry), but they are nothing like your typical fraternities. Most students come here with preconceived notions about fraternities and are negatively biased against joining them, but once they get a feel for what it’s like, they consider joining.

I know that’s how I was and many of friends also. They figured they weren’t big enough party animals for fraternities, but once they looked into it, they saw that it’s not like that so much. Sure fraternities party and have fun, but they’re still engineers and scientists, they still do homework, and all that good stuff. A fact that might surprise people is that the average GPA for males in social fraternities is actually higher than that of males not in fraternities (don’t know about females) I think that stems from the fact that people who are enjoying themselves and have that support network will tend to succeed more often than those who hole up in their room all the time and whose only pursuit is the day-to-day drudgery of school. When the fraternities rushed us, they really emphasized that so that people would realize that they’re serious about academics and grades. I didn’t end up joining a fraternity, but I was very, very close after coming to college very negatively prejudiced against the idea of joining a fraternity.

I didn’t realize that RPI and WPI have graduate schools also (not my area of the country), but that is definitely a huge advantage that Rose-Hulman has over them. I have lots of friends at bigger schools who have graduate programs and their college experience has been completely different, in a negative way. They don’t have personal relationships with their professors. I mean, it’s only 3rd week and I know already that all of my professors know me by name. It’s just totally different. If the opportunity arises over a break or something, I would definitely encourage your son to come on out.

Oh yeah, and the “This is it” definitely happened for me while I was at Catapult. It made my senior year a lot easier.