<p>Ok. here’s the deal. I am a Cooper chemical engineering alum.
Cooper’s reputation is still pretty great outside of the school…but really only in the tristate area.
If you expect a great career fair and oncampus recruiting. this is not the place to be. At no fault of the school admin, most companies recruit at big schools (UT Austin, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, Princeton, Hopkins) so if you want a job post grad…you better network your butt off.
If you want to go to grad school…yes you can get into a pHd program with a low GPA BUT if you want to get into a GOOD program you have to work DAMN hard to get that 3.5+ GPA.
PROFESSORS: The chemical engineering department is horrendous. You will not have a single good professor and will be forced to learn everything yourself or learn nothing all four years. Is this really what a school should be like? No not at all. what are they getting paid for??? Its absolutely ridiculous how bad these professors are. However, the chemistry professors were excellent, math were ok, physics is hard as hell but the department is getting better.
Social life: its completely false to say that there is no social life at cooper and that everyone is a nerd. I think cooper engineers are far LESS nerdy than other engineers. We’re all extremely involved in school activities and go out whenever we can in NYC. If I didn’t have my friends at Cooper I would have gone clinically insane. Its a small school so it is really easy to make lifelong friends.
Greek life: theres one active fraternity. they throw some parties but it’s nothing like an actual fraternity.
quality of education: bad. the professors throw the “you arent paying for this education” card as an excuse. but this is a SCHOLARSHIP not aid. ever student earns a spot at cooper for a reason and deserves respect and a quality education.
facilities theres a new building but I heard there isn’t alot of room since all students use it as opposed to the old hewitt which was for art and archi and the engineering building. </p>
<p>BOTTOM LINE: DO NOT attend cooper if you are not 10000000% sure that you want to be an engineer, you are willing to learn alot on your own, you are willing to deal with annoying and ignorant professors and you are willing to be treated like crap from time to time.</p>
<p>I actually had a very good experience in terms of this in the civil engineering field. Most of the big players showed up at the Cooper Union career fair, and the quality wasn’t much different from the Columbia career fair I went to when I was getting my graduate degree.</p>
This is blatantly false. I am in EE. From my friends in ChemE, the chemistry professors are horrible, the ChemE professors are decent to good, exception department head, the math professors are good, though what you say about physics is true. The ChemE department got a new professor this past year who is really good, a toned down version of Fontaine, for those who know who that is.</p>
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I have heard this used to justify workload, not being a crappy professor.</p>
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Around finals time you will lose sleep, and the school requires everyone to have medical insurance.</p>
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The exact opposite of this is closer to the truth.</p>