Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Date: Dec 26 2013
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
WPI is a great school for various reasons, but some areas definitely could use some improving.

First off, I mainly go to this school because of academics and I got a good amount in scholarship money to afford it. WPI has great, unique, top-notch programs in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) as well as Biomedical Engineering, which are the only majors I am interested in and many schools in the area such as UMass Amherst don't even have these majors. I am a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Major and it is a perfect fit for me! It gives me the option to pursue classes in CS, Bio, Chem, Math and plenty more. I can focus in one area if I want and take a variety of classes I like. A lot of the professors know me well. Job opportunities and grad school options for it are abundant and its exactly what I want to do. If it wasn't for WPI being one of the only schools in the country with this major I'm not sure if I would be here. We also have a very good project system which helps for getting a job and research experience for applying to grad schools. Academics here are great.

Social life is good in some ways, bad in others. Greek Life dominates this school with social life. Many guys here are normal and like to party, while the rest are nerds. Most girls, however, are normal and are social. Most guys, and pretty much all girls, go greek. Its hard to sometimes feel you have a niche on campus if you aren't greek, which is one problem. Going greek is great if you want to be very involved and make a lot of friends, while it is not good with paying expensive dues and being associated with your frat's stereotype. However, if you have plenty of friends and aren't greek, you can still get in to any frat parties any weekend and have a lot of fun at those. In terms of parties, its basically all frats (we have roughly 11 frats). No dorms have parties, and off campus is an option but no where near as prevalent as the frats. There's tech Tuesday but most people then just go to the on campus bar at the Goats head dining hall and drink and play trivia games on Tuesday nights; unfortunately Thirsty Thursday isn't as prevalent. The fraternity parties are pretty good depending on the night and fraternity. I've been to some bad ones which end up as "sausage fests," while many others are strict on ratio and have an overwhelming amount of girls and are a lot more fun. Usually specific frats have better parties than others and some have reputations as having wild parties. If you want to have a fun party scene then either be in a fraternity/sorority or just be very social and know a lot of people in fraternities to always get on the lists.

The people here are nice and you can make some good friends. Its easy to find some good friends here if you look hard. Some people here have too much of a work ethic, while many others are balanced and party every weekend and still do very well in classes. PRO TIP: Get to know plenty of people in your floor freshman year. It really helps a lot, since freshman year is hands down the easiest year to make friends since freshman always look to talk to new people first semester in the freshman dorms. After that year, you need to be involved on campus or make friends in classes.

That being said, the dating scene here is terrible (at least for guys - for girls I'm sure it is perfect). The hookup scene is pretty prevalent. Unfortunately, because of the ratio-which honestly isn't that bad at all because if you are involved on campus and are social it seems like a 50/50 guy to girl ratio-many girls get RIBS and just string along many different guys and don't look to settle down and just want to have fun. It is very hard to find a girl at this school who is single, sincere and is looking to date. Many of my guy friends are single and not by choice. Even if you're a suave ladies man or gentleman, its all the luck of the draw at WPI for finding a girl. Usually the guys here that do get girlfriends achieve it by bare luck. With that, you just gotta adopt the mentality to have fun here and if something doesn't work out here it will afterwards.