<p>For those of you now deciding where to attend, the RPI Career Services 2012 Annual Report may have some information that you might want to consider:</p>
<p>My S is a senior. He and his two roommates all had great jobs lined up by last November.</p>
<p>My DW and I have been very impressed with the school and to see all the name companies that come to recruit on campus and the great end result of this process is simply amazing (as my father says, "the proof is in the pudding").</p>
<p>This speaks a lot to what major employers have found over the years in regards to the quality of the students coming out of RPI and to the quality of education offered by RPI.</p>
<p>Thanks for that. My son is looking at ChemE (possibly MatE), and we were wondering about the coop program. Basically if he has the grades and he wants a coop, what are the chances he will be able to get one? How much support is there? He will be trying to get more info on the accepted students day, but I was wondering what your son’s experience has been. To be honest, it would take a lot of the financial strain off of attending this school, plus the other obvious benefits.</p>
<p>Hello Dadinator…thanks for all the things you put on the RPI thread. My daughter got into RPI. We are in Seattle and have never been there, so we are coming for a visit next week. Her father is a Mechanical Engineer. I have two questions for you. She is undecided about her major, which does not seem common for most of the kids I see posting. Can you start without declaring? What is a Co-op? Is it like an internship?</p>
<p>RunsWScissors- my S did a co-op junior year. The school was very helpful and supportive in making it happen. He will be graduating on-time, so we ended up only paying for 7 semesters of tuition. You can see the co-op salaries in the Annual Report. I was pleasantly surprised at how much he was making.</p>
<p>FrivolousFont - if she is in engineering, she can definitely be undeclared engineering at the beginning.</p>
<p>An internship is three months over the summer. A co-op is 6 months (and you miss a semester of school). My S did both. I think the co-op and internship helped significantly in his obtaining the offers for permanent positions that he received.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info, even if he can’t finish in seven semesters, it would give us a few months of financial breathing space. I know that the ChemEs usually end up doing two co-op semesters because the course scheduling is so tight. But my son is not sure if he wants to do ChemE and the get a masters in MatE through the co-terminal program, or just go with one or the other. We are starting to feel confident that they will work with him to help him decide what he wants and how he can make it happen.</p>
<p>I did both co-op and internship (this was back in the early 1980’s). They both provided excellent experience for the resume as well as helped pay tuition which was skyrocketing at the time due to 15% inflation. I ended up graduating a semester later than I would have otherwise. I have to say that RPI does an outstanding job for placing co-ops, interns and graduates.</p>
<p>I was an average student yet I received numerous job offers upon graduation - and this was during the economic downturn of the early 1980’s.</p>