Well, just stay in California because everyone here knows it’s a goldmine!
Ooh hidden gem sounds good too! Gotta practice that one for the in-laws.
I have to admit Rose Hulman always throws me off when I read it on CC. I (now) know it’s a great school, but I keep thinking it’s a women’s STEM college. Which would be amazing!
I just learned Dean Kaman is a WPI alum so D can start dropping that name. Although I think technically he didn’t graduate because he started patenting his many inventions as an undergrad. So really, he’s a WPI dropout.
Well thanks to this community, our family is now one of those in the know!
But it is pretty crazy to think she’s traveling 3,000 miles to spend the next 4 years at a school we’d never heard of until 7 months ago! It’s been a real leap of faith!
Ha! Well she’ll soon know how amazing the school is and will start sporting one of those “WPI Grandma” shirts around town!
Yeah, it’s funny/sad when we say where she’s going, and the person doesn’t know how to react, like with condolences or excitement. I told her to start dropping Dean Kaman’s name, but I don’t think most people we know even know who he is!
I know what you mean, there were some mega-long posts from previous years that just sucked me in and then sometimes they didn’t say where they ended up! Worse than a soap opera!
Congrats to your D! Those are amazing choices and it’s so cool to see the kids this year really seem to be focusing on what the right school is for them, not always the brand name. I knew SLO was supposed to be amazing but didn’t realize how much until we visited and I can totally see why your D would stick with it even over UCLA. I love UCLA and LA but the smaller student body, class size, LBD etc, there’s so much to love about SLO!
My D feels the same way – although I think Mudd would be the only waitlist school to seriously tempt her away from WPI, she’s so excited to go to WPI I’m not so sure she’d switch to Mudd even if that miracle came through. “Lucky” for us she doesn’t have to make that decision!
Bless you! Sorry, my neighbor’s step-daughter goes there and we always tease her!
Congrats to your kid – that’s really impressive!! (and not just because it’s a top ten university! )
We’re kinda in the same boat – when I say “WPI” a lot of people asked if that was in Washington state as in “Washington Polytecnhic Institute”. Then I said no, it’s on the East Coast, so it was “oh, Washington DC?”
Now that will get you major respect here in California!!
I can relate on the blank stares. At our son’s HS honors convocation, when they called each student’s name they also provided the college they would be attending. Since we were in MI, the vast majority of students were going to MSU and UofM. When the assistant principal called out my son he hesitated before reading “Case Western Reserve”, as though he never heard of it. My wife joked later that he probably thought it was a military academy, like VMI or The Citadel, and he wondered why my son would go there.
I think WPI is like Rose-Hulman; it is generally not well known, but has a reputation as a great engineering school with hiring managers and graduate school admissions boards.
Yeah I can imagine our hs admin thinking Case Western Reserve is some kind of financial institution!
Thanks for your kind words! I do think WPI is one of those schools some people (those whose opinions do matter in the end) will know about. We are educating the rest of the population one at a time.
And again huge congrats to your son, so glad he also picked fit over rankings - it’s all so exciting now, isn’t it?!
I joked with the Assistant Principal later and it turned out that he was from Ohio originally and knew all about CWRU. He hesitated because my son did not provide a witty quote like the other students did.
That’s tough when it’s family. Had a family zoom gathering last night. Should’ve taken a screenshot of the blank faces when we told them where D is going.
I went to one of the top engineering schools in Europe and the world. Nobody has heard of it here. When interviewing for positions, however, everyone does. That’s what matters.
Tell people that your daughter is going to a selective, cutting edge, elite education powerhouse in engineering. And leave it at that…
After graduating with her masters from the University of Chicago my sister went to Silicon Valley for interviews where she encountered hiring managers who thought UofC was part of the public school system in Illinois, like UIUC or Northern Illinois. They knew all about Cal Chico, but they were unfamiliar with one of the premier research universities in the country.
There is a University of Illinois at Chicago, however. I also was a little confused between the two. The prof I worked with at Northwestern had collaborations with both University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago and I was asked to go give a presentation at one and ended up at the other. I was so embarrassed. This was my first year in the US and I knew nothing about the universities in the US.
I live in the Chicago area, and depending on how quickly people are talking, it’s so common to hear people ask “U I C? Or U of C?” when one of these schools comes up in conversation!
I forgot about that! When in Illinois, everyone thought I was talking about UIC.
In California they thought it was UC. I guess UChicago was a smart rebranding although I still prefer UofC.
FWIW, my DH works for a very well-known robotics company in New England. They LOVE WPI grads. Among the engineers at the company, WPI is well represented–alongside MIT, CMU, and Cornell grads. In fact, one of my DH’s colleagues who is a WPI alum likes to boast that (like him) many WPI grads turned down MIT and CMU for the full ride at WPI! I think some of it depends on the region, but rest assured that people in the field respect WPI.
I was so embarrassed. This was my first year in the US and I knew nothing about the universities in the US.
I think some of it depends on the region, but rest assured that people in the field respect WPI.