Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - Off the Record

The prospective college student’s antidote to the Princeton Review doldrums.

186 pages of real insider information to help you decide if this is the right college for you.

Price: $16.95

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Students Tell It Like It Is

'Choosing a college is more than choosing an education; it's choosing a home for the next four years of your life. My goal in writing this book is to help you make the right decision on both accounts.'
Ned McTigue, Author

There are some things about a school that you can't learn from a campus tour or a brochure. The College Prowler guidebook to RPI gives you the unbiased truth from current students about everything from academics to nightlife...

Dorms:

'The freshman dorms used to be a wide range of luxury and those resembling slums. However, recently, the slum-like dorms have been given huge renovations.'

'Barton is the nicest dorm, but it pretty much goes to early-decision students. Beyond that, it's just the luck of the draw. None are amazing, yet none are deplorable.'

Guys and Girls:

'I guess the main thing to know is that RPI is about 75 percent guys, 25 percent girls?everyone calls it 'the ratio,' and it can make some guys desperate and some girls really nasty. The students are definitely far too diverse to put under a general category, though. As you'd expect at any tech school, however, there are a lot of 'dorky' people?and I use dorky in the gentlest sense of the word. You'll find people with all sorts of eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. Believe me when I say there are all types of people on the campus. Whether you are the large football player type or the silent, quiet type, you're bound to find them somewhere. Girls are the same way, just fewer in number. A lot of the girls are nice, but some can get big heads considering the ratio. Fortunately, I'd say most of the girls are hot.'

There's also the local atmosphere to consider:

Several movies have been filmed in downtown Troy's historical district, including The Bostonians (1983), Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1993), and H.G.Wells The Time Machine (2002).
Clemet C. Moore's Night Before Christmas was first published in The Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823 under the title A Visit from St. Nicholas.
In the late 19th century, Troy had a professional baseball team known as the Troy Trojans, and on September 22, 1881, they set the all-time record low for attendance at a major league game?12. The record still stands.
In 1864, an Irish immigrant named Kate Mullany formed the Collar Laundry Union, the first women's union in the history of the United States. In 1998, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the Mullany home, located on Eighth Street.
Troy is known as the 'Collar City' because Hannah Montague cut the collars off her husband's shirts so that she would not have to repeatedly wash the entire shirt simply to get the collar clean. This gave rise to an entire collar industry, and is where the term 'white collar' originated. One of the bridges that takes you across the Hudson in Troy is called the Collar City Bridge.

Find out if RPI truly has something for you, straight from the students' mouths.

Visiting campus isn't enough.

Read our RPI guide and discover what it feels like to be on campus for 4 years.

Discover if RPI is Right For You.

The College Prowler Process

While writing our series of college guides, we felt it was critical that our content was unbiased and unaffiliated with any college or university. By hiring current students as authors, we strive to create college guides that truly represent each campus. Our guides cover both the good and the bad, and whether survey responses point to recurring trends or varying opinions, these sentiments are directly and proportionally expressed through our guides.

From the very beginning, student writers gather the most up-to-date stats, facts, and inside information on their colleges. They fill each section with student quotes and summarize the findings in editorial reviews. In addition, each school receives a collection of letter grades (A through F) that reflect student opinion. Once a guide is written, additional college students serve as editors and check for accuracy even more extensively. This same process is applied to all of the 258 colleges and universities College Prowler currently covers. Each guide is the result of endless student contributions, hundreds of pages of research and writing, and countless hours of hard work. All of this has led to the creation of a student information network that stretches across the nation. It’s no easy accomplishment, but it’s the reason that our guides are such a great resource.