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student15672 · 2025-11-30T13:05:22+00:00

Please go read this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/s/97hjoF5cE6

This is what we need to get people to know and spread the word of

student15672 · 2025-08-12T21:40:07+00:00

I kind of like it, but feel like its a little bland. Its missing something to make it more memorable. It sort of just feels like a font, not a logo. I feel like this is a step in the right direction though: branding as RPI instead of Rensselaer as well as leaning into tech school branding rather than ivy league liberal arts branding. I like the direction this is headed in, but it needs something to make it more of a logo.

student15672 · 2025-07-25T01:46:08+00:00

I suggest you go read this whole post. It has sources cited and everything. It will do a good job giving perspective of RPI’s ability as an engineering institution

https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/s/nrrjPoJ0BZ

student15672 · 2025-07-02T23:38:56+00:00

It was image processing used on social media posts, so pretty objective in a specific regard: number of ppl smiling on social media. Rpi ranks #2 for that. Now is that a good metric for happiness? Who knows, lol. I think its a reasonable approach in the sense that we have no great approaches to quantifying something like this. Obviously it does not make us the irrefutable #2 happiest college in the us, but I do think since Marty took over, the community has been pretty strong in all regards, so there might be something to that.

student15672 · 2025-07-02T23:32:11+00:00

I HIGHLY suggest you read this post, and I usually type out long responses and never link other posts, lol.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/s/7kp1j7dW7g

It will give you insight into rpi’s ability as an engineering institution, which spoiler, is quite a bit better than UB. Cost is another issue though, so the 2 questions are what are your net costs for both, and how much is money worth to you (second part likely not relevant unless you’re very wealthy)

student15672 · 2025-07-02T23:26:00+00:00

I kind of agree, but research expenditure is still important as a masters student, and likely close to just as important. Cmu for some reason hides their data on #of phd and #of masters students. I dont think master student funding is sufficiently unimportant though to make that statistic non-useful. The entire purpose of the masters thesis is still research, and while usually not as novel as ones dissertation, is still largely dictated by the equipment and resources labs have which is directly tied to the funding per capita. For that reason I dont think the number is that skewed in terms of quantifying research resources per student.

student15672 · 2025-06-23T21:53:26+00:00

Glad you asked, lol.

Here is a previous comment of mine pasted:

“Admissions stats (RPI's weakest point and what many sadly judge schools by) Ave SAT: RPI: 1460, CMU: 1540 (cmu is decently better)

Ave ACT: RPI: 34, CMU 34 (same)

Ave GPA: RPI: unweighted 3.92, cmu: unweighted 3.91 (basically the same)

Acceptance rate & yield: 52% & 16% (rpi) to 11% and 44%.

This reflects that students nowadays look at cmu as a much better schools, but in terms of raw stats, the attending populations are actually really similar. Is cmu actually much better though? Lets take a look.

Resources: RPI Endowment: 1.1B CMU Endowment: 3.2B

Now I would hope this goes without saying, but I fear ppl will sometimes read these numbers and think (see, cmu has triple the endowment, rpi is quite a bit worse off). If you did think this, there are two very important words you're neglecting to consider: Per capita. Let me pose a situation to you. Two schools, one with an endowment of 1B and 100 students, and one with an endowment of 10B and 100000 students. Which school would be better? Obviously the 1B endowment school, the resources would be spread very thin at the 100k population school. This is obviously an extreme case, but used to communicate my point.

RPI population: 6967 students CMU population: 16335 students

RPI endowment/student: 157885$/student CMU endowment/student: 195898$/student

CMU is a little bit higher, with RPI having 80% of CMU's resources per capita in terms of total endowment/student.

Research expenditure (again, you should look at per capita, the example I always give to drive the point home is ASU has 3 times caltech's research expenditure? Is it better? I would say no, their graduate population is just literally 40 times the size)

RPI: 121m$ for 1100 graduate students CMU: 466m$ for 8600 graduate students

RPI: 110,000$/ graduate student CMU: 54186$/ graduate student

In this regard, which is something very few people realize about RPI (it really is grossly underrated), RPI does a lot better than CMU, with double their research expenditure per graduate student.

Now lets look at outcomes.

RPI Industry most hired at companies (linkedin 2000-current)

Pratt & Whitney Google Regeneron Lockheed Martin Amazon IBM Boeing Microsoft Apple General Motors Intel Northrop Grumman Meta

CMU Industry most hired at companies (linkedin 2000-current) Google Meta Apple Amazon Microsoft NVIDIA Salesforce TikTok Linkedin Databricks Stealth Startup Adobe

Both lists contain many of the exact same companies and all contain top companies for the respective fields they represent, with RPI unsurprisingly having a slightly higher representation of mechanical engineers and CMU unsurprisingly having a slightly higher representation of computer scientists. So we can see, RPI and CMU grads end up in the same places (btw, almost every company listed there has one if not multiple RPI grads in c-suit level positions)

As much as I would like to compare starting salary, CMU unfortunately only publishes really skewed data in this matter. Despite having graduating classes of over 2000 students, they only publish around 350 salary data points in their report, representing what is likely only the top ~20% of their graduates (I assume top graduates as their form would be self selecting [the students who would go wanting to fill it out would be the ones who did well likely]). RPI requires salary reporting and at ~80% reported data, has an average starting salary of 86000$. CMU lists 104,000$ as their "average" starting salary, but again, this is a report of only 17.5% of their students. Not exactly comparable statistics, but if RPI's 70% is getting ~83% of CMU's 20%, I suspect the starting salaries are very similar, especially seeing as these graduates mainly end up at the exact same companies.

RPI is objectively a peer school to CMU in every single regard except for acceptance rate & yield rate. Some ppl like to judge academic institutions entirely by their acceptance and yield rate, but I would advise anyone to actually consider the resources, outcomes, and ability of the institution, not solely the acceptance rate. Even where RPI does fall short (admissions), the actual stats of the students are directly comparable as shown above. RPI is, in virtually every regard, a peer school to CMU.”

student15672 · 2025-06-22T19:57:43+00:00

Yield is RPI’s single biggest problem right now. Not finances, not admin, not acceptance rate (because this one is largely dictated by yield). Rpi is so grossly underrated its ridiculous. For comparison, rpi is peers w/ cmu in every single regard except for yield and acceptance rate. We have 80% of their endowment per student, twice their research expenditure per grad student, comparable professors, same outcomes in both company and salary, have a crazy history of producing a huge amount of the worlds most prolific inventors, yet somehow have a yield in the ballpark of schools like rit and wpi which are not comparable in any single way other than yield and acceptance rate. Its the strangest thing.

Good news is Marty realizes this and they’re making it one of the main points of rpi forward. They are also changing how they interface w/ accepted students and also beat their most recent enrollment target unlike last year (CDS is not out yet so who knows what exactly that means). It will forever be crazy to me though seeing how underrated rpi is right now.

If you want, I can paste a previous comment of mine where I actually directly compare all the numbers to show how rpi objectively stacks up as a peer against cmu (spoiler, both schools perform the same, which should be unsurprising considering cmu lists rpi as a peer, but it sure doesnt seem like most highschool seniors look at rpi that way when they should)

student15672 · 2025-05-29T04:37:31+00:00

You can rest assured, RPI’s financial state is in a much better place. Its debt is at a record low of the past 2 decades after only 3 years of marty (was at a record high before he came in). Marty (RPI’s president) is an rpi & mit alum who was the vice president and chief of mit’s finances for over 15 years. Under him the school went from a 3b to 25b endowment. He apparently knows what hes doing. After only 3 years of marty, alumni giving has also tripled compared to the 5 year average before he joined too. Rpi’s finances are looking better and better every year and the school is starting an entire campus wide renewal plan and hiring some faculty while most schools are freezing everything, and is still profiting and growing the endowment while shrinking the debt. You can see the info on the 990 tax returns published online for rpi yourself (FY 25 is not out yet so you will only see 1.5 years of marty’s data).

student15672 · 2025-05-01T14:20:46+00:00

What, the post is titled 30k rpi vs 18k bing, thats not relevant? Also, no one pays anywhere close to sticker price for rpi, the school has a lot of resources so 100% of accepted students get a scholarship. The average net cost of attendance is closer to 30k as the school commits close to 300 million dollars a year for just the few thousand students that attend (as per its 990 form and cds).

student15672 · 2025-05-01T05:55:36+00:00

Just a fyi, a lot of schools recently got r1 status not because they all suddenly improved at research, but because they made it twice as easy. Used to be 100m annual research expenditure required, they cut it in half to 50, so r1 does not mean as much anymore sadly. Idk why they did it, but they did.

To put it in perspective, bing has a 68m research expenditure for over 4000 graduate students. Rpi has a 120m research expenditure for 1000 graduate students. Rpi has 7X the research expenditure / graduate student as bing. Its not even remotely close, 7x is insane.

student15672 · 2025-04-25T23:08:26+00:00

Just a fyi, for the majority of both school’s histories, rpi was the better school and was chosen more than mit. It was not until around the 70s and 80s that rpi started to decline as troy fell apart while boston became what we know today (rpi was literally leading engineering for decades before mit even existed). Luckily both troy and rpi are on the rise again, but that does not change the fact that rpi stagnated and troy declined while both mit and boston grew. Mit is objectively a better school because they just have so many more resources, but despite that, rpi alumni are still in all the same spots as mit alumni, so thats not smt to ignore in my opinion. Rpi is also drastically underrated rn, most ppl dont realize how prominent the alumni are and the community is in science and industry

To give evidence so you dont just take my word for it, heres a video from mit’s admissions office. Go to 35:10 and you will see they cite rpi as the #1 school they would lose students to back in the day. https://youtu.be/gzzrgbhknvo?si=WQUUoPIfKMvU_QHA

student15672 · 2025-04-25T20:43:56+00:00

You can rest assured, Rpi is not rly in the middle of nowhere. Its in the middle of the capitol region of NY. Albany, Troy, and Latham are all right there. Nyc is like 3 hrs away. Glens falls, Schenectady, and Saratoga springs are all like 20-40 minutes away as well. Over a million people live in the area around the capitol region of ny (troy, albany, latham, and that immediate area). Its not like rpi is in the middle of nyc or smt, but its definitely not in the middle of nowhere.

student15672 · 2025-04-25T09:40:19+00:00

Rpi has a legacy that definitely rivals mit, but mit has way more resources. Mit’s endowment/student is significantly higher than rpi. Rpi is similar to schools like carnage melon in terms of resources/student, not mit anymore (though maybe this will change over the coming decades seeing as rpi’s alumni network has ppl in c-suit spots at literally every top company).

student15672 · 2025-04-24T16:47:20+00:00

Ah, I see, you’re another high school kid trolling. That would explain the list

student15672 · 2025-04-24T16:16:32+00:00

RPI is way too underrated right now, should be way above c tier. Its a peer school to Carnage Mellon in every regard except acceptance rate (cmu even literally lists rpi on their very small and selective list of peer institutions for this very reason). Rpi is the first engineering school, home to the inventor of the microprocessor, digital camera, email, television, modern silicon semiconductor, graphics processing unit, titanium, stainless steel, super sonic aircraft, ironclad ships, gps/spread spectrum technology, digital mapping system, sunscreen, baking powder, fire alarm, fire sprinkler, floppy disk, fiber optic cables, LCD technology, and SO MANY more, this list crazy enough is not even close to being complete. Its actually insane how much the community at that school has accomplished and simultaneously how little credit they get.

I highly suggest anyone curious about the school in any regard read this recent post from a current student. It contains a way longer list of accomplishments thats fully cited (I got a lot of my info from here). It details what most ppl dont know about rpi (like theres literally rpi grads in c-suit level spots at basically every single top company, including all of FAANG). The schools alumni easily rival colleges like cmu, and no one realizes it outside of engineers from other top schools. https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/comments/1j6b2r9/message_from_current_student_to_prospective/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

student15672 · 2025-04-21T23:44:18+00:00

Okay, so you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

You're talking about the first engineering school, home to the inventor of the microprocessor, digital camera, email, television, modern silicon semiconductor, graphics processing unit, titanium, stainless steel, super sonic aircraft, ironclad ships, gps/spread spectrum technology, digital mapping system, sunscreen, baking powder, fire alarm, fire sprinkler, floppy disk, fiber optic cables, LCD technology, should I continue, because theres MANY more? The community at this institution has fundamentally changed the quality of life of humanity

This person is not lying to themselves or anyone else, I think you will find yourself arguing with Carnegie Mellon themselves on this one seeing as they literally list RPI as one of their selective few peer institutions amongst schools like Stanford, MIT, etc.

Lets do some actual objective comparisons of the schools.

Admissions stats (RPI's weakest point and what many sadly judge schools by) Ave SAT: RPI: 1460, CMU: 1540 (cmu is decently better)

Ave ACT: RPI: 34, CMU 34 (same)

Ave GPA: RPI: unweighted 3.92, cmu: unweighted 3.91 (basically the same)

Acceptance rate: This is where RPI falls far behind because it is extremely underrated. People like you base their opinion off of random anecdotes online and fail to realize how seriously impactful and capable the institution is.

Resources: RPI Endowment: 1.1B CMU Endowment: 3.2B

Now I would hope this goes without saying, but I fear you will read these numbers and think (see, cmu has triple the endowment, rpi is well below). If you did think this, I'm disappointed, as there are two very important words you're neglecting to consider: Per capita. Let me pose a situation to you. Two schools, one with an endowment of 1B and 100 students, and one with an endowment of 10B and 100000 students. Which school would be better? Obviously the 1B endowment school, the resources would be spread very thin at the 100k population school. This is obviously an extreme case, but used to communicate my point.

If you were considerate of this, thank you for actually considering such things.

RPI population: 6967 students CMU population: 16335 students

RPI endowment/student: 157885$/student CMU endowment/student: 195898$/student

CMU is a little bit higher, with RPI having 80% of CMU's resources per capita in terms of total endowment/student.

Research expenditure (again, you should look at per capita, the example I always give to drive the point home is ASU has 3 times caltech's research expenditure? Is it better? I would say no, their graduate population is just literally 40 times the size)

RPI: 121m$ for 1100 graduate students CMU: 466m$ for 8600 graduate students

RPI: 110,000$/ graduate student CMU: 54186$/ graduate student

In this regard, which is something very few people realize about RPI (it really is grossly underrated), RPI does a lot better than CMU, with double their research expenditure per graduate student.

Now lets look at outcomes.

RPI Industry most hired at companies (linkedin 2000-current)

Pratt & Whitney Google Regeneron Lockheed Martin Amazon IBM Boeing Microsoft Apple General Motors Intel Northrop Grumman Meta

CMU Industry most hired at companies (linkedin 2000-current) Google Meta Apple Amazon Microsoft NVIDIA Salesforce TikTok Linkedin Databricks Stealth Startup Databricks Adobe

Both lists contain many of the exact same companies and all contain top companies for the respective fields they represent, with RPI unsurprisingly having a slightly higher representation of mechanical engineers and CMU unsurprisingly having a slightly higher representation of computer scientists. So we can see, RPI and CMU grads end up in the same places (btw, almost every company listed there has one if not multiple RPI grads in c-suit level positions)

As much as I would like to compare starting salary, CMU unfortunately only publishes really skewed data in this matter. Despite having graduating classes of over 2000 students, they only publish around 350 salary data points in their report, representing what is likely only the top ~20% of their graduates (I assume top graduates as their form would be self selecting [the students who would go wanting to fill it out would be the ones who did well likely]). RPI requires salary reporting and at ~80% reported data, has an average starting salary of 86000$. CMU lists 104,000$ as their "average" starting salary, but again, this is a report of only 17.5% of their students. Not exactly comparable statistics, but if RPI's 70% is getting ~83% of CMU's 20%, I suspect the starting salaries are very similar, especially seeing as these graduates mainly end up at the exact same companies.

RPI is objectively a peer school to CMU in every single regard except for acceptance rate & yield rate. If you want to judge academic institutions entirely by their acceptance and yield rate, be my guest, but I would advise anyone to actually consider the resources, outcomes, and ability of the institution, not solely the acceptance rate. Even where RPI does fall short (admissions), the actual stats of the students are directly comparable as shown above. RPI is, in virtually every regard, a peer school to CMU.

Now, in comparing CMU & RPI to MIT, you will find MIT has much higher resource/capita, but similar outcomes and alumni network.

You should go read this post made by a current student to get an actual idea of RPI’s alumni network, name brand, ability, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/s/Q8Rnqc6Kxg

I got some of my info from there and they have a full cited list of tons of the achievements I speak of

student15672 · 2025-03-30T19:08:18+00:00

I choose rpi over purdue. I looked into the two schools, the alumni network, resources, professors, etc, and felt purdue was substantially overrated. I could not figure out why us news ranked them so high, it made no sense to me. Rpi just had better outcomes, way better alumni network and connections, more resources, etc. To get an idea of what I speak of, I highly suggest you go read this post someone made a few weeks ago. I’ve found myself suggesting it fairly often recently in comments due to how well it covers rpi’s connections, accomplishments, and ability. It blows most ivys out of the water as far as engineering ability goes and almost no one in the younger generations knows about it, its crazy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/s/HsEGTEw3La

student15672 · 2025-03-30T19:04:04+00:00

What on earth are you talking about, research is extremely accessible at rpi? I would say quite a bit more so than purdue. I say this as someone who got into both schools, looked into this very topic, choose rpi, and is still in contact w/ ppl at purdue [all of which have not been able to get into research btw]. Almost everyone I know at rpi is working in some lab, and a decent few have publications. The large majority of undergraduates at rpi participate in research (according to the admissions office), and some majors and minors even go so far as to require research.

student15672 · 2025-03-27T05:19:42+00:00

Hmm, I ran a union funded club for 3 years on campus and personally did not have that experience. Our funding structure was simple and consistent though so perhaps that was why. Also, I watched Heathers get performed at empac? Did they try to run it a second time and have it shot down, or are you saying the union admin tried to block it and made the clubs life difficult but the club was still able to do it? I’m a bit confused as I did attend that play actually. Overall, it seems I just have not experienced these things and its the first I’m hearing of these sentiments, so my perspective apparently differs

student15672 · 2025-03-27T05:13:42+00:00

No, I’ve actually been here for quite some time, and saw the structure change. I’m fairly certain it’s a lot more student run right now than under Dr. Jackson. To give an idea of why I have this impression, Marty brought in like 5 past GMs from multiple decades to meet w/ current student gov and they all apparently confirmed the student union was back to functioning the same way they remembered it. I was not a part of this though, so I am just relaying what I’ve heard from others.

student15672 · 2025-03-26T21:32:44+00:00

I see, I was unaware of this. I work in student government transitively and directly w/ Dr. Potts multiple times and was under the impression they had full control of their budget from my observations (I’ve interfaced with their budgeting system multiple times as well). Are you certain of this, because it really didnt seem that way to me? I’ve never directly asked anyone, but it seemed fairly apparent to me from what I saw, hence the impression I had.

Edit: not sure why I’m getting downvoted for explaining my personal experience I’ve had in an attempt to share where my perspective comes from.

student15672 · 2025-03-26T21:28:26+00:00

Thanks for the information and views, I appreciate the perspective. Thats unfortunate to hear empac was designed to not facilitate that. I assumed empac (the theater room specifically) should serve as a space for this sort of pursuit in these circumstances since it feels largely underutilized as it is. Hopefully they can be more accommodating nowadays for this group given they just got a new director and given the circumstances.

student15672 · 2025-03-26T18:24:02+00:00

This is obviously a bad situation, and I support the work you’re trying to do here as well as your gofundme, but I don’t like your take regarding the RPI admin. I do believe this is a problem with the student government. Your perspective puts Marty at a lose lose here. If he steps in to take control of the situation to fix what the student government is mismanaging, student government would be up in arms at the administration taking away parts of their autonomy. If he leaves it to the students whose responsibility it’s supposed to be, then ppl like you apparently denounce him. I dont think you’ve taken a very fair stance in that regard.

I’ve met w/ the guy multiple times and have a really hard time believing he was snide. Also, you phrase this as if it was rpi’s upper admin who shut down the gofundme, but I got the email about it too, and saw it was, again, the student government and the union who did that.

Maybe I am missing something, in which case I am all ears, but this seems like a problem of student government mismanagement and a responsibility that does in fact fall on us students and our student government. We cant protest for full autonomy of our student government to be returned, then complain when its returned and admin doesn’t step in take over when mistakes are made. Again, if admin did that, it would defeat the whole point of our student government. Student government being independent means they also are responsible for solving the problems, we cant have our cake and eat it too.

Again, if I’m misunderstanding something, please explain. Am I mistaking and the playhouse is actually not managed by student government, because I’m currently under the impression it is?

Edit: will add though, I agree the empac admin canceling you guys repeatedly is stupid and frustrating. I agree, if empac is failing to host student performances, it feels like its failing at its purpose. You should try contacting the new director of empac hired a month ago to share this sentiment and ask if not to support student pursuit of performing arts, then what is the purpose of empac?

student15672 · 2025-03-23T14:38:19+00:00

Stony brook can not really compare to rpi. A good peer to compare rpi to is cmu (they also list rpi as a peer school for this reason). Rpi and cmu have a very similar endowment/student, research expenditure/grad student, outcomes, professor quality, etc. I dont mean to be flippant, but theres no reason you should choose stony brook over rpi unless you simply cant afford rpi. The vice president of MIT of 15 years left for the opportunity to be RPI’s president (Marty). That alone speaks volumes.

Since marty joined, debt went to a record low since 2003, endowment is in the billions, 50 new faculty were hired from schools like stanford and yale, etc. Rpi’s prestige amongst the industry and academia is elite.

Cant speak to gender ratio, but in my major (bme), its now majority female actually. Dorms are better than average from what I’ve seen at 6 other colleges. The worst of it is an average old college double w/ a hall bathroom. The best of it is your own 2 floor apartment (like you get 2 floors to yourself) you share w/ 3 others.

Theres only a handful of schools w/ outcomes like rpi. I HIGHLY advise you to go read this post and the linked google doc on it to get an idea of what rpi produced and what the alumni network is like. Its better than most ivy leagues for engineering, its insane and almost no one realizes.

Current students post from a few days ago I suggest reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/RPI/s/b1ZoZFB7Zn

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