<p>We went to SOAR and my kid went to WOW. SOAR ended up being critically important as I got financial aid and deadline info that I had not heard of before. It really saved us.</p>
<p>At open house I was advised to go to SOAR because it would be a great opportunity to finalize financial aid details, as well as to talk to advising about learning which of my community college classes will transfer. They also said that it would be a good time for the advising center to help me get all of my options for my student academic plan.</p>
<p>My son and I had a great time at open house. We toured the dorms first, North Mountain and San Lucia. Just about as advertised here on this website, no real surprises except for the dude who strolled down the hall of San Lucia in a towel not realizing that a hundred of us were standing there. Also got a little inside info here and there, the 3rd floor of San Lucia is about 10 degrees warmer, so bringing a fan is a good idea. </p>
<p>We next toured the rec center. That place is “sick” as my son would say. Good luck finding a better workout facility, anywhere. Everything is brand new and the design of the building is amazing.</p>
<p>Next, University Welcome, complete with marching band, cheerleaders, school President, teachers etc. I was impressed that the whole weekend was organized and run by students, not the admin. This was part of their “learn by doing” experience and they did a great job. </p>
<p>We then enjoyed the welcome by the College of Engineering. They had all the deans of the various departments come up and throw tee shirts into the crowd. Lots of fun. They had a slide show running explaining all the national awards that the College received recently and their high rankings. Ridiculously impressive.</p>
<p>We were then led to the Computer Science Department luncheon by someone with a sign so we wouldn’t get lost. My study of the campus map was thus wasted. Oh well. We went right by the library, named after RFK–ya baby–and to the extremely modern area of campus where the computer science labs are. I was very impressed by the buildings over there, amazing. </p>
<p>We then had a box lunch before the program started. Impressed that they had vegetarian sandwiches since we are veggies, but they were pretty soggy. I backtracked to the Subway next to the RFK library to get my son another sandwich before the program started. </p>
<p>Next we received an excellent presentation by the CS department faculty and students. Extremely impressive. I loved the diversity of the faculty and their various perspectives on CS. I can’t pronounce or spell the dean’s name, but he is very colorful with his greek accent and enthusiasm for the school. It is clear he works very hard in making sure Cal Poly’s CS program is top notch. For example, he brings in tons of speakers from the tech world so the students and faculty can stay on top of the latest. Many of these companies recruit there as well. </p>
<p>We also heard from Dr. Seng (sp?) who is into the intersection between CS and robotics, Dr. Jantzen (sp?) who spoke about software engineering and explained how he and Cal Poly help CS majors start their own companies, another professor who I’d guess is of Persian descent who was into natural language programming and showed us his “wiki-bot” program demo that answers your typed questions with wikipedia information, then he showed how he programmed it to have condescension, sarcasm and other personality traits in its dialogue with other programs. We also heard from a female professor who was big time into the graphics end of CS as well as another prof that was into game development. There was another prof who spoke, he was very intelligent and impressive, but his name and topic escape me, perhaps because he didn’t bring a demo for the huge screen display they had set up. LOL</p>
<p>We also heard a great deal from the CS students who told us about the variety of different clubs available. One of them remarked that they learn more from all the clubs and extracurricular stuff available to CS students than they do with their classes alone. That kind of blew me away as the classes they talked about seemed pretty awesome.</p>
<p>My son liked the CS 123 class they described for the first quarter. Rather than making everyone take a CS 101 cookie cutter class first quarter, they do this one instead where students can pick this project oriented class with the topic of their choice, ie. game development, robotics, graphics, etc. This sounded awesome since my son is really into robotics as well as programming. It blew me away that he would have a class in his very first quarter where he can delve into robotics, in addition to joining the robotics club as well. </p>
<p>Then we headed to Avilla Beach and had a great time like we did last Spring Break. So we skipped the “Friday Nite Invite” deal, and got some burritos and ice cream and walked the pier, heard some of the reggae bands that were there for the street fair. We stayed at the Avilla Beach Inn which is cool as they have a nice video/dvd and record library that you can use and take whatever you want back to your room. We went with “Tora Tora Tora” which was awesome. </p>
<p>Saturday was the day my son was looking forward to most as the CS, CPE, EE and other College of Engineering majors put on an awesome event in the Mott Gym. We chatted with a couple of Computer Engineering majors, one who had been interning at IBM all through Cal Poly and was hired there for after graduation. The other shared that the company he was interning at decided to pay for his masters degree education. We talked to others that were interning and hired at tech companies, every one was so happy with the results of their education. They also told us about their various senior projects and capstone projects. One gal designed a monitoring system for the dorms that allows students in each dorm to view how much energy consumption was going on in their dorm. Some other guys designed some drone like helicopters that were on display.</p>
<p>My son got to do some programming of the scribner robots that were there, but he was too old to build his own robot, that was just for the kids. 
But we watched the robot competitions, including the highly entertaining Roborodentia 2013 in which the robot known as Plastico staged an amazing come from behind victory over The Claw in the finals and won $1,000 in prize money graciously donated by Raytheon, whose CEO is, you guessed it, a Cal Poly grad. There was prize money for the other finishers by the way. All these robots were of course designed, built and programmed by the Cal Poly students. They had raffles and gave away build your own robots and threw a lot of T shirts into the crowd. Lots of fun all the way around. </p>
<p>We grabbed some Pizza on the way out and made our 9 hour drive home even more impressed with Cal Poly than before, and very excited for the Fall!</p>
<p>Glad to hear that you had such a great time! I’m sure that not too many people were probably upset about a college dude in a towel. </p>
<p>BTW, the library was named after Robert E. Kennedy, a former university president, not RFK, the former attorney general who was assassinated while campaigning for the presidency. Not that it really matters…</p>
<p>@sutteyo!! Your experience sounded as impressive as ours! As I’ve said again and again the Open House can be transformational! So glad you had a great time. The crazy thing is that after enrollment, the school keeps getting better and better! </p>
<p>**Did anyone go the Rodeo? That was one of my favorite events for the entire weekend! **</p>
<p>Wow, thanks for the info New Mustang. </p>
<p>@Osakadad, yes it was great. We were actually sold on the school after we visited last Spring. My son accepted his offer right away, so this was more of a trip to get more familiar with everything.</p>
<p>Overall, a great experience at Open House. My D loved the farmers market Thursday night which really showed what a fun college town San Luis Obispo can be. It was there at the Orientation booth that we met the first of many very friendly students that weekend. One great feature the kids introduced us to was the Guide Book app developed for both Andriod & iOS smartphones which allowed you to build a personalized schedule of events complete with maps and all the other details necessary to navigate your way around the campus. Totally impressed me (and I’ve spent my whole career in tech starting when the Internet was a baby back in the late 80s) Haven’t seen anything like it at the other schools we’ve been to.</p>
<p>Was very impressed with the Orfalea School of Business…many great programs to choose from!</p>
<p>Great stuff everyone! Keep the thread going!!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My son was on one of those teams mentioned. He’s been competing in Roborodentia for 4 years. I remember his first year, his team’s robot barely budged from the starting line. Twice. He kept building robots, not because he gets class credit (he doesn’t) but because he’s doing what he loves.</p>
<p>@vballmom Wow, what persistence! Those last 2 robots were pretty amazing, you must be extremely proud.</p>
<p>I was impressed at how good natured and friendly all the students were, even though it must have been stressful as well. At times, it was kind of like an Apollo mission where something goes wrong and adjustments have to be made on the fly. I talked to a couple of members of “Team Claw” before the competition began and they correctly predicted to me that it would come down to them and “Plastico.” </p>
<p>I thought it was also pretty cool how it how a lot of families showed up to cheer for their students. We sat between 4 family members that were clearly pulling for “Robocop” and another family, speaking French, that appeared to be there for another entry.</p>
<p>May I ask what your son’s major is? And was he able to take any robotics related courses? I talked to one student that mentioned just one 400 level engineering course with perquisites so I am not sure if my CS son will be able to work his way into that.</p>
<p>suttyo - small world, isn’t it? I’m going to miss the Open House. We’ve got one more trip coming up, graduation in June, then good-bye to SLO.</p>
<p>My son is a computer engineering major. He hasn’t taken any robotics courses but did take one on microcontrollers and has taken many programing courses. His capstone and senior project were related to robotics as well. Your son can join the robotics club if he’s interested. They do many projects in addition to Roborodentia.</p>
<p>[Calpoly</a> Robotics Club](<a href=“http://robotics.ee.calpoly.edu/]Calpoly”>http://robotics.ee.calpoly.edu/)</p>
<p>Like vballmom, I’ve been to four Open Houses. The first one was in 2010 after my daughter was accepted. Since she was on a h.s. choir trip, I decided to go anyway. I loved the whole vibe and texted my daughter all day, taking lots of pictures along the way. </p>
<p>Shes very active in her club, STRIDE, so has been at a booth each year on Saturday. I’ve enjoyed visiting her there, as well as checking out all the other booths. The last couple of years we’ve enjoyed other events on campus later in the afternoon. I’m going to miss Open House! And next year she’ll be a senior and will be able to graduate a quarter early in March. So she won’t even be at Open House! I might just have to drive down there, anyway. I’ve brought our dog the past two years. </p>
<p>Oh, I forgot…I actually went to Cal Poly’s Open House (then called Poly Royal) in 1988 when we visited with our now grown daughters who were only 12 at the time.</p>