I was accepted to FIT as an Ocean Engineering major back in November through rolling decision. They offered me a scholarship and a grant for my total cost.
Could any current students and alumni provide more information and insight about the school in general? Student life, living on campus, academic programs (specifically Ocean Engineering), sports (I was looking at the surf team), and just what’s it like to have Melbourne as a college town? A lot of the information and threads I found on the internet regarding FIT was kind of outdated, and I would like to see what the school is like now. Even some of the mailings I have received have statistics as recent as 2016.
More information: I am an OOS student so it is harder for me to come down to FL and plan a college visit or a Discovery Day during the week. I am currently waiting to hear back from 4 different colleges by March, so it will be a while before I make my final decision.
The nice thing about FIT is that the campus is small, classes are small, and there are only around 5,000 students. You’ll get to know people and your professors better than at a big school. There aren’t many dining options on campus (again, since it’s small), but the few dining options are great. The main dining hall has excellent food.
Melbourne as a beach town. It’s mostly professional (engineers at Northrop, Harris, etc.) or retired people. FIT used to have a bus on the weekend to Downtown Melbourne. I’m not sure it still runs, but Downtown Melbourne was the sport for students. It has a bunch of bars that are nice for socializing.
I believe the surf team is a club so anyone can join. The other sports at FIT aren’t very popular. The stereotypes are true, it seems the engineers aren’t very interested in sports. I saw an email the other day about esports. It looks FIT might be adding esports teams. I think esports would be a better fit at FIT than physical sports.
Thanks for posting this! My son will be starting in the Fall and he wants to know specifically, how does the dining hall work? Like when you enter do you check in and all you can eat or is it more like pick one entree and a salad?
He’s going to be on the 7 day plan.
You swipe the card and enter Panther dining and have at it! There are a bunch of stations and you can eat at one or at all. If you have unlimited dining, you can go in once a day or ten times. You can get a full meal or just a drink or ice cream cone. My daughter’s boyfriend had just a ‘lunch’ plan because he lived off campus, but he could go in as many times as he wanted between 10:30 and 3 - and sometimes he ate there 3 times, once at 10:30, once at 12:30, and again just before 3.
On the dining card you can also choose to have some of the meals as $500 (? that’s what it used to be) dining dollars, and with those you can eat at the deli, at the pizza place, or at the little store they have. My daughter had it all as dining dollars as a soph-senior. If she went into Panther Dining, there is a price for each meal and they’d take that amount off her account. She graduated with money left on her card as there is just no way to eat that much.