Same
Purdue vs Perdue chicken 
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GT. No brainer. Better program. Co-op opportunities as a tradition.
My son was deferred for EA, CS major OOS. We still haven’t heard back. The original letter said we should hear back by March 31.
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Last year my S22 heard back mid March but I believe the bulk of deferral decisions came out at the end of March.
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I’m not sure this is a no brainer. They are both excellent schools but I hear the atmosphere is different. My son didn’t apply to GT but I have heard it’s very competitive amongst the students, maybe even cut throat. That might not be every student’s cup of tea. I think this would come down more to best fit than anything else.
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Georgia Tech is not at all competitive. Very collaborative environment. I think people assume that because it is a difficult admit and an engineering school but that is not the case at all. I would say it is the opposite.
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To answer your question about Georgia Tech versus Purdue here are my thoughts. Purdue is more than twice as big as Georgia Tech. It can be overwhelming. My nephew is there and 40,000 undergrads is a lot. He has found it so. Georgia Tech is half as big and frankly I think an undergraduate campus of around 18,000 is just big enough.
Georgia Tech is not only smaller, but also more selective, which does impact what happens on campus. When we toured, one of the professors said something like we are like the University of Alabama with a number one recruiting class every year, so no wonder these kids do amazing things. And they do. Georgia Tech is now the third most selective public school in the country after this admissions year, behind UCLA and UC Berkeley. That being said, there are great opportunities on the Purdue campus as well. My nephew has had some amazing ones!
If it is possible for you to visit both campuses, I would do so. Very very different places. I suspect your child will have a preference for one or the other.
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This!
While there are similarities, especially with career services/internships/coops, there are many differences too. My D refused to apply to GT. Location was the deal breaker for her even though it checked off many other boxes.
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Good to know. Thank you for correcting me.
My son accepted his offer a few days ago and has been invited to join the Early Start program. Does anyone have prior experience with Early Start and was it worth it?
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We have a family friend who just did it this year and loved it. He is shy, but he made good friends on the first day (that he still hangs with), and it helped smooth his transition to college.
Our son won’t be doing it, only because none of the courses are quite the right fit for him for the summer, and he also wants that time to earn money at his job. But I’ve heard good things about it.
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My son is also planning to do Early Start. He has a friend who is a current sophomore at Purdue who highly recommended it.
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Oops
Scholarships is also an unclear process. My D23 recently learned that a friend with lower stats than hers (no SAT scores sent, lower GPA, etc received various scholarships) and she did not. It is definitely a learning process for my daughter of how unfair things can be but she was actually questioning 
the process.
One thing that has helped me is to remind myself (over and over) that these kids are more than stats. College admissions and scholarships are more than just a prize for the people with the highest SAT scores and good grades. Thus, it’s possible that the situation with the lower stat friend really is a fair/just outcome. Maybe, holistically, that student has something of value that goes beyond stats and maybe the scholarships were indeed fair (?)
That said, learning the valuable lesson that life is unfair is also important as well!
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Another thing to remember is that students applying for certain less popular majors (e.g., education, agriculture) may receive more or better scholarships, even with lower stats, than students applying to “hot” majors (e.g., computer science, engineering, nursing), due to the varying competitive levels of the applicant pool. Did your D23 apply to the same schools for the same major as her friend?
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To what programs/majors did they apply? Purdue has no problem attracting/enrolling students in CS, FYE, Flight, and a few others, so they need to offer little incentive to attract those students to enroll.
As a data point, my D21 was valedictorian of a class of 600, 1580 SAT, 12 AP 5’s, 3x AIME, etc., was admitted to Honors College but, as a CS major, received nothing but the automatic $500 NM scholarship. Supply/Demand.
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Could those scholarships be need based in some way??
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I better learn how to spell Purdue correctly, especially since my son committed yesterday! 
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