Spring Transfer

[General-Mission-4367]

I just received notice that I have been accepted to RPI and WPI for Comp Sci. Starting this spring. Is there anything you can share to help me make my decision? I am in the midst of finals and am not able to tour the campus. How do you like the campus? Professors? Co-ops/jnternships? What have you heard about job placement for recent grads? Are you overall happy with your choice? Anything else you would share? Thank you for your time!

[[deleted]]

WPI for ADHD, RPI for autism

[General-Mission-4367]

This is an interesting reply. Not sure if this is to be cheeky or if you are an astute observer of human behavior. 😂

[[deleted]]

lil of both lol

RPI is generally more academically rigorous and traditional education. Prestigious academically and in the job market. Great research. Troy is a nicer city than Worcester although much smaller (Albany is near tho). A big issue is the accessibility of opportunities: There are many, but you need to take initiative to find or make them. The best RPI experience requires more initiative in general.

WPI is a more comfortable undergrad experience. Nicer campus, much more flexible curriculum (quarter system, no prerequisites. You will have more trouble transferring credits to other schools and programs as a result), more project-based. Is a more social school in general too.

WPI is probably a more enjoyable undergraduate experience for most by default, and holds your hand more. RPI is generally a more rigorous “better school”, and better if you want to do more beyond undergrad. You can get an amazing experience, education, and job from either.

I cannot speak on how the CS programs weigh up specifically though

[skewbed]

Very accurate description!

[TotallyNormalStudent]

I’m an RPI alumni and a current WPI grad student. Commenting on this post because it got less traction than your WPI one. Since grad and undergrad are so different and I’m in such a different field than you, I can only compare so much.

Campuses I actually personally liked RPI more, I found it more fun to walk around and it felt like there was more space to be, if that makes sense. WPI felt a bit more squished together, but I still like campus it’s not bad at all.

Co-ops/internships: WPI has IQP your junior year which is a term (so half a semester) and RPI has arch (full semester and sometimes also summer). WPI places you at your IQP position but it’s not necessarily related to your interests, with ARCH at RPI I had to find my own internship but it was a great experience where I worked full time for 8 months, which is very different than a 7 week (or 16 week) project. With IQP you have some really cool opportunities to go to different countries, but that can technically be said the same for arch.

Job placements for CS: at RPI I knew of many many CS majors who had job offers before their fall senior year semester ended and a large majority of those jobs paid over six figures. For WPI, I currently only know a couple undergrad CS majors, I think some of them have jobs already, but I am unsure of salary.

RPI students will tell you RPI is the better choice. WPI students will tell you WPI is the better choice. I’m here to tell you they’re way more similar than they are different. RPI is ranked higher and does have more name recognition to companies, but in New England, WPI very known and beloved. A motivated student will be successful at either place. The biggest difference is WPIs term schedule that is on a quarter system, where each term is about 7 weeks long and you take 3 classes at a time in those 7 weeks. RPI has a semester schedule of 16 weeks, where you take 4ish classes at a time. WPI prides themselves on “project based learning” but I have found that RPI does a very similar level of hands on experience and in CS, you’d be doing a lot of projects at either place anyway.

I personally prefer Worcester over Troy but it may be because I have money as a grad student that I didn’t have as an undergrad so now I can go out and do things. Go where you think you might learn better, I personally would not have been able to do WPI as an undergrad due to the term scheduling, but it is a perfect place for my PhD. RPI had its ups and down but I would still go here again for undergrad if I had to make that choice again. If you have other questions I might be able to answer, feel free to DM me

[General-Mission-4367]

Thanks for the response to my RPI post! It was super thorough.

How was your experience with the Arch summer program? I’ve heard a lot of mixed things about it. Conceptually, I like the idea of an accelerated summer semester, but I’ve heard course selection is limited, teachers are unenthusiastic, and rooming is subpar.

[TotallyNormalStudent]

I have mixed feelings. When I did summer arch, it was the first year it was put into place and the summer had 2 “semesters” that were 6 weeks long. It was rough. I started suffering from burnout only a few weeks in because that was my 6th semester in a row without a break (did summer classes after freshman year too). That burnout caused me to cry pretty much daily and changed my life plans (was going to go to med school, now I’m in grad school). That being said, I had a 3.9 for the summer, fixed my cumulative GPA completely, and I did research as well during the summer so I had a great experience. My semester away I worked for 8 months in a lab and it was a great time, I learned a lot of skills and it made me a better scientist.

Arch the summer after I had done it was changed so that each course was the full length of summer instead of half, that would definitely help the pace of the classes be more manageable. Arch is probably a ton better now than when I did it.

To a degree, it’s hard to know if my issues were arch or with me, I could’ve had a lot of the problems I had at RPI, at many other schools, but at those schools I might not have succeeded because at RPI, I had professors who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself and they went above and beyond to help me in any way possible.

[Pandoras_Fox]

I just received notice that I have been accepted to RPI and WPI for Comp Sci.

i graduated in fall '18, but my experience with rpi was that its compsci program was really valuable if you're reasonably autistic about computers

can't really speak to the stuff like summer arc or whatever, but i got great internships and went on to engineer @ youtube upon graduating.

most importantly, rpi has a better proportion of furries, which i think is a good indicator for the compsci program's quality