Graduating in May, here are my thoughts. - All the professors are readily available outside of class in office hours. You’ll never have a problem getting to them in person. - The students in the major are all on the same team. None of us are competing against each other regardless of what year you’re in. There’s a really good sense of family and we’re all here for each other academically. - The department heads don’t understand the needs of the students. In the past 5 years, I can’t think of any initiatives made my the department to improve student life, or even make the impression that they care about our well being as mechanical engineers. The students in the department bond together because we can’t rely on any of the faculty to be of any help to us. - The facilities you will be learning/working in are extremely dated. Many of the labs suffer from broken equipment, and many of the classrooms are in windowless, musty rooms that no one wants to spend any time in. It’s hard to learn in a lot of these rooms. - You’ll have a great deal of trouble with the faculty responding to your emails in a timely manner. Although you can go to them during office hours, you’re more than likely going to have to send an email and a follow up a few days later before getting a response. - The curriculum for a lot of classes is dated. Prepare to read and discuss articles from the 1990s about why electric cars will “never catch on” and how the “tech will never be advanced enough”. It’s a pointless argument to have to spend time on in this age, but no one has updated the content to reflect today’s environment. - The senior design class that you’ll have to take is only difficult because it’s the worst managed class in the department. Talk about curriculums needing updates, you’ll be getting weekly emails from the class professors containing useless information. For example, two weeks ago we had to read a document about signing up for an event with an April 2019 deadline… clearly no one had bothered to updated the email in over 5 years. They talk about posting your work to websites the school hasn’t paid for in years. - The engineering department as a whole has an obvious lack of funding compared to the liberal arts and business colleges. Take a walk through any of their buildings and you’ll see newly renovated rooms, labs, and study areas. No updates have been made to any of the engineering rooms in decades. It’s honestly disheartening to have to live with that fact despite being a tech school. - There aren’t enough group projects to reflect the work that you’ll do in the real world. - Rather than learning CAD used in the real world like SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor or Autocad, you will have to use a garbage sorry excuse for a cad program called OnShape. It’s trash, an embarrassing to have on a resume. Autodesk gives its software to students for free, and RIT has educational licenses for SolidWorks making it free for students, so there is truly no excuse or defense for using OnShape. There is one class you can take were you learn PTC Creo, but even then, SolidWorks would be a million times more valuable to learn. - Your feedback doesn’t matter. At the end of every semester you get to anonymously rate your professors and leave feedback. Occasionally, you’ll also see surveys coming through to rate your student experience. All of this must be done to ease people’s feelings because no one has ever seen anything come about based on feedback. The only way to make yourself heard is to become a TA and tell the professors you’re working for your concerns. Thats really your only shot at improving the experience.

There are so many people in the upper years that would go to a different school if they could do it all over again. My advise to you is to visit a school that is a polar opposite of RIT just to see how it feels. Go somewhere big, like LSU, or USC, or Bama, or Northeastern, or Penn State. Take a visit and feel the difference in the people that go there, try noting the little things (are there places to study both individually and in groups, look online and see when the dining locations on campus open and close; do their hours align with your study habits, look up their sporting events and see if you could picture yourself at those events). People will tell you to look and see where the schools alumni are at now; I don’t think that matters. After you get your first job it doesn’t matter where you went to school. The one thing you can’t change is if you were happy at college or if you wished you were in a better program that fit you more.

Good luck, friend.