All questions about RPI welcome!

Colleges and Universities A-Z Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
81

Troy is not like upstate NY in my mind (if you are talking Rochester, Syracuse), but YMMV. It is near Albany which isn’t “BIG” but is pretty big. Also about 2 hours from NYC, no offense to Buffalo, but…

Look at the NRB program: http://www.rpi.edu/admission/guide/nrb.html

Noting your other school from your previous posts, I’m not feeling P’burgh is really a “BIG” city in any positive sense (we drove around a good bit when we visited that other school, hours within and around the town). But if you would be miserable to be so close to home, ditch RPI (sorry folks!).

CMU has a better overall rep, but RPI is probably more comfortable than CMU for really geeky people. But thought RPI students seemed friendlier than CMU students (except my son’s friend who was a CMU freshman and seemed very pleased to see him!).

I felt P’burgh was nice in terms of some of the elements, but the CMU campus turned me off big time and felt very inner city and dirty. Pitt was a huge presence in P’burgh too, and seemed very “check cashing” / “pawn shoppy”. Just my experience.

We did not have the feeling that RPI was “overrun with frat d-b’s”. They only have D3 sports except for hockey and Greek presence was minimal the times we visited. The frat houses we saw were on the campus fringes or off-campus (where I went to school, many were on campus even in the middle of buildings we took classes in, not just by the dorms). There are definitely some d-b’s there, it’s a 70% male campus, from what we saw on the Accepted Students Day.

So, I’d say pro-RPI, for you:

  • near enough to NYC to visit occasionally, and that is a BIG CITY with amazing resources
  • IMHO, less upstate NY (read: working class, if that’s what you are implying) than P’burgh - P’burgh (I just realized - no, not Plattsburgh!) is very working class from our experience. Like, fried cheese curds, homeless, blight (beautiful to look at from the top of the inclines though)
  • better video game program from what people say - CMU only has a “concentration” which sounds relatively new, RPI actually has a BS

But if you want to leave upstate NY, the Albany area is technically upstate NY, so don’t make yourself miserable every day by feeling like you never left HS.

(I have to ask - you picked two places pretty similar to upstate NY - why not Florida or California?)

82

No place in Florida with a good program, and California is too far for my mother lol. All of the other schools I applied to were either in Boston or New York, and to be honest I definitely liked Pittsburgh well enough to call it a city (especially compared to Troy)

Thank you so much for your awesome response! I will take all of that to heart! (PS, I am starting to lean more RPI) :slight_smile:

83

I just visited Troy this week, and lived in Pittsburgh (as a grad student at CMU) for a few years and I have to disagree about the differences between the cities. In some ways, Troy reminded me of Pittsburgh in terms of age, and architecture. But Pittsburgh is a MUCH bigger city with much more to do than Albany. And from what I’ve heard, it’s improved a lot in the recent years. It feels like a city. And the neighborhood CMU is in is lovely - Schenley Park on one side, Shadyside on the other, and yes, Oakland with Pitt - which is definitely a bit grittier, on another. And CMU is full of geeky people.

I don’t know which school is better for you or what you want to study, but Pittsburgh is a far bigger, nicer city than Troy. Troy is definitely a small town - not a city.