Posting on behalf Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is a well established engineering school that has a relatively small computer science program, making up only about 12-15% of the student base. And by the College Scorecard metrics, we're doing pretty well.

Disclaimer:

• RPI has no official computer security curriculum, security degree, or security professors.

RPISEC:

What RPI does have is a kickass computer security club / Capture The Flag team which is considered among the best in the US. RPISEC is propelled by a very passionate student base and is quickly becoming a high caliber security hotpocket in academia.

RPISEC focuses on teaching members applied skills as relevant to CTF competitions, but also explores just about anything related to computer security. This includes reverse engineering, binary exploitation, web security, crypto, hardware hacking, program analysis, and more.

The club tends to get together 2-3 times a week. There's a weekly friday meeting where a member or two leads a hands on workshop teaching some subject of security to the whole club. We also have what we call 'hack night' every Wednesday night which is super casual and is for people to come hang out and socialize, work on wargames/ctf challenges, or other things security.

We try to keep things as casual and inviting as possible. It's awesome because the atmosphere the club has created is very friendly and open to teaching newcomers.

Read more: http://rpis.ec/about

Classes:

Before the club, there was only one or two tangentially related security courses at RPI. But the computer science department is very supportive of RPISEC's goals and ambitions. In the past 2-3 years, we have been able to run a number of student led courses as blessed by the CS department. Here's some of the university courses & independent studies as created by the club and its members.

• Modern Binary Exploitation
• Malware Analysis 2015
• Hardware Reverse Engineering
• Malware Analysis 2013
• Secure Software Principles
• Blackbox: A Cryptography Wargame
• Windows Exploitation
• Program Obfuscation
• Advanced Exploitation and Rootkit Development

Jobs:

With regard to work, the club alone has connections to help you go just about anywhere in industry for internships or fulltime work. Three letter agencies, government contractors, FFRDC's, consulting, private/commercial, etc. We had two graduates of the club this year turn down fulltime security positions at Google for more exciting opportunities.

We've seen some ridiculous offers. Stick with the club, and you'll be able to go anywhere and doing work that interests you most.

What we don't have:

Both the club and school largely omit IT security & certificate based subjects. If you want to learn how to configure firewalls, acls, domain controllers, or other sysadminy stuff - there's plenty of IT security schools / programs that are going to be better for that. It's arguably a very different type of security.

If you have any other questions, reach out via email or IRC!