A technical student guide to surviving the Rochester Institute of Technology and not dropping out
Image credit – unknown RIT fellow from the r/rit subreddit. Please help find the author
- Scope
- The problem introduction
- Definitions
- Before you arrive
- Your first week
- Your time at RIT moving forward
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1: RIT’s less than ideal geographical location
- Appendix 2: GDD major specifics to keep in mind
This document (Manual) is meant to help incoming RIT prospects to understand the realities of studying as a Computer Science (Software Engineering, Game Development) student and give a few tips in order to successfully graduate college.
This document can be used for other RIT majors, but certain sections are specifically tailored towards software engineering majors.
The document is created from the perspective of a senior RIT student that went through the entire Game Design and Development Bachelor’s program and is in the final semester before graduation. It is important to note that the author is writing this manual with the realities of the situation as his top priority, aka, where praises are due to the university they will be given and the same goes for the criticism of the university and other aspects of studying at RIT.
The problem introduction will cover the reason why this document has been created and what modern RIT CS students face according to the official numbers. The section will give a high-level list of problems that students face as well as set up an expectation of what students can take away from reading the document in its entirety.
Definitions will cover some of the slang and technical terms that the reader might have not encountered yet. In particular there will be a lot of terms related to the software engineering field as well as terminology that a lot of RIT students use nowadays.
Before you arrive goes into detail on topics that should be considered prior to the first day at the university. It’s applicable to any prospective student.
- Financials covers information about getting your education properly funded and how to not end up out of school due to poor financials.
- Housing and the move in process goes over the pros and cons of RIT housing that you should know about.
- Meal plans gives insider information on what the meal plans are, what to avoid, where to dine and so on.
Your first week covers what RIT students should really consider doing for their first day/week. It is the time to properly establish yourself as many people that you live next to will accompany you through your education at the school. It will be your first light introduction to networking.
Your time at RIT moving forward goes over all the details that CS students specifically will encounter up until their final day at school:
- The workload will cover the amount and type of work students will encounter and how to cope with it.
- What to take advantage of and what to avoid will shed some light on some of the academic activities that students should try to stay away from and what the author found especially effective towards the students’ success.
- The engineering grind will talk about what RIT never covers as it is potentially the hardest part of being a software engineer while in college.
- Life hacks and helpful tips covers general purpose tips for taking the most out of RIT and staying sane with all of the responsibilities one will have.
Going to college is probably one of the most exciting moments of one's life. You get to continue your education at a higher level, meet new people and develop skills that you might have never thought of. It is a big step towards adulthood, but many students underestimate this step that they are taking. By getting accepted into college you’re no longer treated as a kid, but rather as an adult and must be able to understand how to cope with many intricacies, such as networking, student loans, time management and more. Some incoming freshmen do a poor job at researching their chosen schools and as a result might end up unhappy and drop out. Not only that, but the university itself might fail at relaying crucial information to newcomers due to a multitude of reasons, ranging from financial gain to simple poor communication abilities.
This issue is especially prevalent when we take a look at the Rochester Institute of Technology. According to the National Center for Education Statistics the graduation rate at RIT is about 67% percent since 2018. In a perfect world we would see a high 90s percentage, but unfortunately due to a number of factors not all students find their success:
I aim to use this document as a manual to help students prepare and understand what they are getting into when they commit to RIT. It will cover things like housing, time management, career prospects and general advice for staying positive and in a good health condition. All of this is also coming from a soon-to-be-graduate from the Game Design and Development program, so you should know that I’m not sponsored or had any RIT staff involved in the development of this manual to avoid staff bias. I’ve been there and have made my fair share of mistakes so I would like to see future prospects avoid them as much as possible.
It would have been nice if I could have made a multipurpose guide that could apply to all majors at RIT, but since I have an engineering degree, a large portion of my suggestions can only apply to computing major students, so please keep that in mind.
Also, in no way shape or form will I be trying to discredit the school in this manual. I’ve finished my own degree here and want to maintain a good relationship with the faculty and administration. On the other hand, I will be realistic with the criticisms as without voicing one’s opinions we will not see any changes applied for a better future of the school and its retention rate. Thus, I will begin my guide to surviving RIT as a computing student!
Appendix - a section of a book that provides supplementary material, to further explain a particular topic.
Computing Student - a student that deals with a lot of coding. Generally, covers majors like Game Design and Development, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Cyber Security, etc.
Private Loans - a loan borrowed not from the Federal government but from a private entity. That entity could be a bank, an agency or even your own family members. These loans must be paid off on their own and the rates are applied according to the private contract you will sign with the private entity.
House floor - special floors for dorms housing where students are grouped based on a special interest, such as computer science, photography, engineering etc. Usually these floors have “house rules”, organizations and special activities for the members of the house.
Rushing – the process of getting enlisted in a Greek sorority or fraternity.
You’ve gotten accepted! Awesome, but what’s next? There are many factors that decide whether you should even consider entertaining the idea of going to RIT before taking a look at them realistically and making educated guesses on your future at RIT.
The very first and foremost idea that needs to be going through each college applicant once given an offer is to understand the distribution of funds for their college. You have to absolutely estimate how much college will cost for you after the applied financial aid, loans, plus the added cost of college inflation. For example RIT's cost inflation since 2015-2016 is 8%, which is wild! Without distributing your available funds as well as the financial aid properly - you might see yourself in a lot of financial troubles. Things that can help with that are sites like https://www.getintocollege.com/ where both parents and students can learn how to finance college properly.
Keep in mind, that upon committing to your financial aid, student loans are automatically attached to your name. They will not go anywhere and you’re solely responsible for paying them back to the institution you’ve borrowed them from (usually it’s the Federal US government).
Upon reviewing your financial aid package as well as the tuition cost with the added inflation, determine if across the degree timeline will you ever not be able to pay for school. Keep in mind that you should only take into account stable sectors of funding your education like existing savings, your parents’ support, scholarships, etc. Something like a side job working as a cashier while in school won’t cut it as you can probably only dedicate about 20 hours per week, which is nothing in comparison to the end cost of going to RIT which is about 60,000$ (with tuition, housing, food, etc) a year. Obviously, you’re not paying the full amount each year due to financial aid and RIT is very generous with awarding scholarships, so it’s your job to grab a calculator and start counting!
If you’re nearing the cost to match RIT, there are certain aspects of the costs that you can offset to manage to pay for school:
- Food costs
- RIT on campus food is extremely expensive, especially the ones closest to freshman dorms like the Corner Store or Sol’s. My advice would be to avoid them entirely and cook your own food. By ordering grocery delivery your average cost for food would be roughly 11$ per day (150$ per 2 weeks), while dining at RIT locations costs on average 23$ per day (320$ per 2 weeks). If you’re a freshman though, it’s impossible to avoid this problem as you are required to have a meal plan, and also there are no appliances that you can use to cook in dorms besides a communal microwave. A large portion of your charges can be cut down though the moment you move to more “user friendly” RIT housing. More details on meal plans can be found under “Meal plans”.
- Housing
- Your first year is a financial bummer as you are forced to stay in dorms, which is not cheap. There are advantages like meeting your first college friends, but here we want to stay focused on the financials. Upon being able to move out, select some of the cheaper options such as Riverknoll, Perkins Green, or off campus housing entirely if you have your own vehicle.
- Also, specifically to NTID and NTID cross-registered students: Many NTID scholarships require remaining in the dorms for your second year, and limit you to only on-campus apartments (University Commons, Global Village, Riverknoll, and Perkins Green) for your third year. If you are applying to or through NTID, make sure to keep this in mind.
- More details on housing under “Housing and the move in process”.
- Apply for scholarships
- A very valid way to obtain funds for school is to partake in different STEM competitions and letter applications for scholarships which will guarantee large amounts of funds specifically for paying for college. Usually your own high school should have such opportunities, but if not, apps like Scholly allow you to search for scholarships that are tailored to you. I’d recommend doing these prior to receiving your acceptance letter and in your early days of high school in order to accumulate a large amount of scholarships. As a fellow technical writing student had suggested:
“If you spend 10 hours and only get one $1000 scholarship, you’re still technically getting paid $100/hour for your time”.
- Ben Potter
I personally believe that if after applying all of these methods you are still unable to attend the school - don’t! Your final option is effectively getting private loans, which is extremely unsafe. Upon getting private loans your loans are no longer centralized and you will have to start paying them off in accordance to the loans you owe to the government. Simply put - if your education requires private loans, please reconsider attending it.
RIT housing is acceptable for a college, but it’s a financial drag for freshmen students as you are forced to live in college dorms. In the past you had no choice but to live inside randomly assigned rooms and roommates, but RIT has listened and now allows you to select your own room / roommates. Dorms do have their advantages like meeting college or even life long friends, but also, you’ll come across some of the more disgusting things like poor hygiene kids, deserted and trashed rooms, puked out bathrooms… My advice is that you should be responsible and treat everyone the same way you would treat yourself.
Moving in is also very hectic, but you can mitigate that by avoiding the “orientation”. The orientation is meant for incoming students to adjust to college life by doing a bunch of icebreakers. They don’t provide any academic benefits, but they might land you your first acquaintances at the school. If you want to get the best of both worlds – don’t come for the first day and come in during the middle of the whole orientation. This way you will avoid the weird parents and the insane rush, but also still be able to attend all of the interesting social events they have in store. Not to mention that the flight / bus / train tickets will be much cheaper if you arrive slightly later.
From my personal experience - I would recommend arriving 3 or 4 days before the already attending students arrive - this way you avoid the freshman parking onslaught as well as the second wave in the form of existing students. This way you can calmly settle in, explore the campus and setup a meeting with your academic advisor on your own accord. Your actual first few days after the move in will be discussed in the “Your first week” section.
Upon entering the end of your first semester of the school you will be assigned a time slot to select your new housing following your sophomore year. These time slots are tailored to freshmen students so I highly recommend making time for this to select the best housing option for you.
If money is not a problem, my suggestion would be to live at University Commons:
It’s the most prestigious housing option as well as the most well equipped one with multiple bathrooms, clean kitchen, and built in air conditioner. You will also be given an option to live on higher floors so you’d get a nice view out the window. It’s not that close to campus (in general) and there are no buses coming to Commons, so you’d have to either drive or walk. The good thing though is that the closest college to Commons is the computing one, so if you’re a CS, GDD, SWEN, etc it won’t take too long – at most 5-10-minute walk time from the furthest Commons accommodations.
If you’re a little hard on cash - Riverknoll is the absolute cheapest option out there and the closest to the computing buildings.
It comes with a hard sell though as it’s completely unfurnished and really requires some renovation.
A good balance of price vs distance to the college vs quality of the apartment is Perkins Green.
It’s not as old as Riverknoll and has a bus coming to the area every 10-15 minutes that gets you right next to the computing college. It also recently got furnishing added to it, which slightly bumped up the price of rent, but it’s still affordable: 2500$ a semester (2 bedroom). My advice would be to get a group of friends to slot in all 4 spots for the 2-bedroom apartment and renew it each year until graduation. Important note is that the higher year status you have the lower priority will you get in terms of housing.
RIT auto assigns you a tiger 14 meal plan upon your first-time arrival:
At first sight (especially for a parent) these meal plan options are really good as Gracie’s is considered an all you can eat. The problem is that Gracie’s doesn’t provide good quality food and has failed a number of quality checkups – breaking a lot of dining safety precautions. Thus, I want to save you a lot of time and money and just go for a meal plan with the least Gracie's meals and as much debit credit. That way you will have the most freedom to choose where to eat and the least amount of hassle to finding food your first year. Keep in mind that debit does expire. In the past, when I used a meal plan it expired by the end of the semester so make sure to unleash the debit till the last penny before the end of the semester.
The first week is essentially your first light networking assignment so getting it right is almost essential to creating a good setup for year 2 and onward.
Upon arrival at the university you might be tempted by a number of activities such as: clubs, Greek life, part time jobs, etc. Let’s break down each of them so I can give you some better ideas to focus on:
- Greek Life
- provides no academic and partial professional benefits to you. From my perspective, it’s an advanced social activity that you can take up to meet new people and partake in non-profit assignments that you may or may not put on your resume. It is an absolute time commitment, so evaluation of your schedule is a must in order to not overburden yourself. Not to mention that entrance into a Greek group includes a fee, some of which ask of up to $1000 (varies based on the group). My suggestion is to stay away and use that time to work on your side projects or take up a sports activity / go to the gym.
- Clubs
- a valid thing to enroll into especially if it’s something related to your major like a Linux group or a sort of “mobile developer enthusiasts”. These can help you accelerate your knowledge of a certain topic in computing and RIT has one of the best Cyber Security run clubs: https://www.ritsec.club/. Only join these types of clubs if you are truly interested in the section that they cover or have experience in it, otherwise it’s a complete waste of time.
- Part time jobs
- These are tricky. If you truly need the money then it’s a no brainer, otherwise try to focus on academics and developing your computing skills. Look at it this way: if by working on side projects you get yourself into Google, it will out perform whatever side job you could have taken with just your first pay check. But even if you don’t get into Google – you still grow and become better at the things you’d be doing once you graduate.
Besides considering the activities like clubs and jobs, try to network with other students. In particular - make friends with people on your dorm floor, students in classes that are specific to your major and upperclassmen of the computing majors. Here is why:
- Dorm floor friends could be especially useful when you’re trying to find housing. Usually all of the people on your floor will have the same housing selection assignment so it would be very convenient for you to get the Perkins Green 2 bedroom apartment with someone on your floor who you’re already friends with (the housing I recommended in “Housing and the move in process”).
- Making friends in the earlier classes of your major will allow you to have a less stressful time when working on project-based classes. A lot of the advanced projects in Computer Science and Game Development require you to do programming-based projects as teams, thus getting good teammates that you can trust and work with is essential to your sanity later on.
- Finally, upperclassmen friends are extremely valuable and I see a lot of freshmen make the same mistakes all the time of not interacting with upperclassmen either out of fear or insecurity. I’d suggest to ignore that and go out of your way and chat with upperclassmen. They have years of experience, knowledge on the college’s intricacies and will be your ticket later on into companies to intern or work full time for.
By simply making friends in these sections you will be miles ahead in your college experience and it will provide support for you in the harder times during your stay at RIT.
As you continue your studies in a computing major of your choice, I always recommend freshmen to follow this 3-step rule to a successful completion of your degree:
- Study
- Practice
- Hustle
Studying involves doing the requirements of the degree. Practicing involves stretching your coding skills and applying them to test coding problems and hustling requires you to work on side projects that you can later on show to employers or potential investors.
All of them will be discussed in their own specific sections so let’s first talk about the workload of your degree.
RIT likes to pretend that it’s an IVY league school, so the contents of many computing classes are very intensive. Lectures, labs, exams and coding assignments are something that you should expect to be doing every week.
I consider the large workload a good thing as it quickly accelerates you with all the necessary topics in computer science as well as make you a far better engineer in the eyes of employers as some colleges tend to take their time, while RIT computer engineering become versatile with data structures and algorithms by the end of their first year. The important part to remember is to always try to stay focused on making progress with your studies and minimize slacking. Stuff like writing down a to-do list can be something that will help you a lot with keeping track of your study work and leave some time to practice and hustle.
While working towards your degree you will notice that the academics will try to engage you in a number of activities; some of them are awesome for developing you as an engineer, and some are just complete time killers which instead could have been used to practice or spend time working on your side projects:
- Avoid information sessions and meet and greets. A lot of companies will hold “corporate lectures” about who they are and what you would need to do to apply for job opening. I found these sessions extremely useless as they don’t provide any info that you can’t find online. For example, what’s the point of coming to a Microsoft info session when everyone already understands their industry? Simply apply online and save yourself some time. It’s actually almost anecdotal as the recruiters at such events will say the exact same thing.
- Attend hacker competitions and game jams. As a computing student it’s always an important thing to do is to put your newly acquired skills from class into practice. Since most of us don’t start with job offers in hand - attending different competitions and app creation marathons is a good way to meet other engineers and also apply your development skills to good use and actually come out with either a prize or a working project prototype that you can later on show to someone important. An alternative to would also be working on your personal side projects, but more on that in “The engineering grind”.
As I’ve mentioned prior there are 3 steps to being a successful engineer and successfully graduating RIT. I’ve gone over the study section, but there is still a slight cloud over the practice and hustling steps. How much more work can be done besides being good at your academics? Unfortunately, modern computing has become almost like a competition and each opportunity in the industry is offered only to the best.
In order to be at the top of your engineering game at RIT you must continuously practice at coding interviews. This way you will be adequately prepared for internship opportunities and might land jobs at some of the highest profile companies. A good website that I used in the past (and even use today) is https://leetcode.com/. Many Silicon Valley questions have been posted there so practicing and understanding them is a great way to get the hang of coding interviews and begin to see patterns amongst all of the questions.
Besides having wonderful skills at coding interviews, you must be able to actually attract companies to you so that you can be even given a chance at an interview. The way computing engineers do it is by working on side projects. These projects come from a wide range of topics like data visualization, games, advanced algorithms and more. It’s really applying your skills from class into a physical form that you can showcase to an employer. The more visual the project the more attention it will garner.
If you follow these guidelines you will be able to find opportunities and internships a lot easier and will successfully fulfill the CO-OP requirements at RIT.
Many people become a little nervous when I talk about these 3 steps, but it’s just the reality of modern computing. Some people tend to be especially nervous about it as they feel anxious that they might be falling behind and not be a successful engineer. Trust me, everyone without prior experience feels that way. As long as you take your time with understanding computer science concepts, truly study and work hard towards being an excellent engineer – new opportunities will start popping up left and right!
- Make a portfolio website. Grab a template and drop links, videos and screenshots of your application that you can show to employers. This will make it a lot easier to advertise yourself for finding internships and simply linking others to your work
- Ask your peers for referrals. When looking for CO-OPs the hardest thing is usually to get noticed, so getting a friend of yours to drop a word in for you to a recruiter will make a big difference
- Take advantage of the existing on campus sports facilities. As a computing student you will be spending a lot of your time sitting in one spot looking at the screen. I highly suggest to spend your free time at the gym to destress and also to keep your health in good condition
- Making a schedule can be confusing, so why not use existing apps made by students that will make creating a schedule a lot easier: https://schedulemaker.csh.rit.edu/
- Take advantage of Teaching Assistants. They exist for a reason and will make the difference on certain advanced topics in computer science. Just please make sure to respect their time and life as well.
You can see that studying as a computing student at RIT involves a lot of small decisions that can significantly impact your future. You must correctly select your housing and meal plans to stay comfortable at home, but also stay focused on your studies and practice coding to become a better and more attractive engineer to companies. By following the guidelines above and combining the “go to the gym” mentality to keep your health and body in a good state you will have a great time developing your skills, landing a wonderful full-time job and graduate RIT with respect from your peers and the academics.
I’ve recently discovered an article that has brought up a number of issues that pertain to RIT’s low retention rate. It’s a good read and covers a number of other topics that I’ve decided to look over: https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/rochester-institute-technology/234615-answer-to-why-rit-has-low-retention.html
What I did want to bring up from the article is how it mentions RIT’s poor geographical location. It is known that RIT has really poor weather, but honestly even MIT closes down during the winter season sometimes. Some of the best schools out there have to deal with bad weather, but really what’s specifically not advantageous to RIT is its distance from “civilization”. To be more specific, RIT basically sits in the middle of Henrietta and it’s quite a distance away from the Rochester city. With that, students without vehicles are locked to the general RIT area and it’s a hassle to travel down town to do things. It can be a little depressing when you can’t go far and are locked within the RIT bounds – especially during some of the colder seasons. Please consider this when deciding to attend RIT.
GDD is an intense major that requires a lot more work from you than other computing majors. A lot of criticism falls upon the program as some have described it in a way that it teaches you a bunch of different topics, but is not focused enough and thus fails to create a specialist out of you. I partially agree with this criticism, but you also need to understand something: the degree is called “Game Design and Development”. The degree gives you a set of options to choose from for you to understand where in games you want to become a specialist. And this is where the difficulty of the major becomes more apparent: you need to do a lot of self-studying and development.
Upon realization of your focus you must begin learning on your own, create your own side projects that will emphasize what you would like to be doing in the game industry. For example, if you went into the degree and during your first year you realized that you wanted to do engine development, then you should start tinkering with OpenGL/DirectX, start taking up advanced courses that are specific to that topic rather than taking random electives from the GDD program, tweet at industry vets with questions, etc. (If you decide to be a game programmer than the 3-step-rule for CS majors also applies to you on top of what I just said, see how difficult this gets?). You make the GDD program specific to what you need and if you don’t then yeah you absolutely end up with a degree that teaches you a bunch of different things that doesn’t come out to anything specific. Here is my to-do list that should help you find success in GDD:
- Figure out specifically who you would like to be in the games industry within your first 6 months at the school. Indie developer doesn’t count. What counts are: Engine programmer, Gameplay engineer, Designer, Tools engineer, 3D modeler, 3D animator, etc.
- If you’re passionate about modelling or animation creation, then switch majors immediately. GDD is a programming and game design major, aka NOT for artists
- Become social on twitter and other platforms where game developers gather. Become active and interact with industry vets. Getting a good relationship with them is going to go a long way when you start looking for internships and full-time positions
- Do the 3-step guide mentioned in the “Your time at RIT moving forward”. The coding interview practice doesn’t apply to designers so simply double the amount of quality projects to pump out.
- Assemble a portfolio (add a GitHub page on top if you’re a coder) and a LinkedIn and advertise yourself appropriately according to the specification you chose.
- Attend game jams / hackathons whenever possible, but do make sure that your portfolio doesn’t just consist of 2-day jam games. Work on your own things, something that is more long term. This way you can show employers that you can get something big from start to finish.
This should get you going in the right direction. Also, for GDD students that decided to become programmers, check out this link: http://bit.ly/programgames.
- https://www.rit.edu/fa/diningservices/
- https://www.rit.edu/fa/housing/content/housing-rates?academic_year=2020-2021
- https://www.rit.edu/fa/housing/
- https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=Rochester+Institute+of+technology&s=all&id=195003
- https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/RIT
- http://bit.ly/programgames
- https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/rochester-institute-technology/234615-answer-to-why-rit-has-low-retention.html
- https://schedulemaker.csh.rit.edu/
- https://leetcode.com/
- https://data.democratandchronicle.com/restaurant-inspections/monroe/grace-watson-dining-hallbeanz/667508/
- https://myscholly.com/
- https://www.getintocollege.com/