What Rose-Hulman Students Say About…
Student Body
Rose’s “religious, conservative” students “have glasses [and] pasty white skin,” and are mostly “hard working, small-town kids that learn well hands-on. There are a lot of incredibly technically gifted students here. It is a techie’s paradise!” The majority “are male and have problems communicating with members of the opposite sex (welcome to an engineering school!).” These self-described “tools” like to “play video games constantly or computer games,” although a sizable subpopulation is into athletics. “We’re very diverse socially,” notes one wry student. “We have everyone from computer nerds to computer jocks.” The few women here note, kind of optimistically, that “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Pirates here are apparently homophobes; wrote one, “Shiver me timbers, they hate gay people and love naked wenches.”
Academics
The engineering school with a heart: that could be the slogan for the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, according to students here. “Everyone here is very personable and accessible,” writes one undergrad. “There aren’t too many schools where the president will routinely sit down and eat lunch with the students.” Agrees another, “The relationships are very personal. I’ve had teachers invite us to their house and even come in late at night to hold a study session. When I see a professor around town, it’s so cool to talk to them. They know who you are.” The “small class size and individual attention to students’ needs” at Rose “ensure that a rigorous engineering curriculum is understood by all students.” Rigorous indeed—as one engineer put it, “Rose is a great school if you have no problem with devoting your life to studying for four years.” The workload requires “110 percent effort” and the material can be downright soporific; explains one student, “The Rose-Hulman professors’ ability to send their students into a zombie-like state from the amount of homework and studying is matched only by the excitement they show during classes while teaching stuff they love.” As you might expect, profs here “all have quirks ranging from being an anglophile to being a hippie to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.” In this way, they match the students; explains one, “The professors are all really unique; you know you have the right major when they remind you of you.” One such idiosyncratic student thinks—and writes—like a pirate. Quoth the scholar-brigand of his instructors: “Argh, the profs, they be good, matey. I be gettin’ a good book-learnin’.”
Campus Life
As at most engineering schools, “Life at Rose is spent mostly studying and always worrying if we haven’t. Everyone is excited about the good salaries they will earn after college, or the stuff they’ll be equipped to do.” Reports one student, “Everything revolves around homework. Last year after two guys in the sophomore engineering curriculum disagreed about an equation, one hog-tied the other and scribbled his version all over his body. This is our idea of a joke.” When books are closed and computers shut down, Rose is a “very Greek-oriented” school; “For the most part, if you’re an upperclassman and aren’t Greek, you’ve got nothing to do,” complains one sophomore engineer. Some here make their own entertainment (“We have hall sports. This includes shooting frozen oranges at cardboard boxes with slingshots. And lubricating the floor and sliding in your socks,” reports one resourceful undergrad), while many others simply “spend a lot of time in their rooms on their computers. We like to tool it up . . . play LAN games on our kick-ass network. Yeah!” Intramural sports are also popular. Terre Haute, unfortunately, doesn’t offer much in the way of off-campus diversion. Now, you are no doubt wondering: “What do the pirates at Rose-Hulman do for fun?” Answer: “Thar she blows! We enjoy math and cars and sports and women.”
