Not Quite Liberal Arts

I spent all of last week visiting my friend Fernando at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(RPI) in upstate New York where he's a senior pursuing a degree in Air and Space Engineering. As a graduate of liberal arts and a possible MFA candidate(just got into American University, woo!), it was quite a culture shock for me to venture into an engineering school.

Although I had limited exposure to the actual campus since I was staying at my friend's frat house off-campus, one can learn a lot from simple conversation with engineering students. The first and most obvious thing I noticed was that I didn't meet a single person who majored in the humanities or the arts (except for one of the brothers' girlfriend who was an English major from another school). In Gettysburg College, asking a random array of students what their major is would usually result in something along the lines of Political Science, History, Spanish, Classics, and the occasional Bio student. In RPI, the same question would be more along the lines of Chemistry, Bio-Med, Applied Physics, Computer Science, Applied Science with Computing Concentration, etc.

Naturally, the fact that it's almost strictly an engineering school changes the culture of the institution quite a bit (it's so close to being entirely an engineering school that people would joke around about them even having easy majors such as psychology and the humanities). In general, engineering students seem to work harder than liberal arts students, but they also played harder (literally). Part of the culture of engineering student involves board games, card games, video games, computer games, etc. Unsurprisingly, these students had brains that were driven more by logic and reasoning which would explain their fascination for problem-solving in academics and outside activities such as puzzle games.

I was impressed by the campus itself--it blew my mind that they essentially had one building for every science they taught--there was a physics building, a chemistry one, a multi-floored computing lab, a biology one, an observatory, an experimental science one, etc. I asked where the English one was, but people just laughed. I thought that their arts building was, by far, the coolest one. RPI students told me that EMPAC(Experimential Media and Performing Arts Center) was the crown jewel of RPI. I went there to see Fernando play the congas during a jazz show inside one of the auditoriums.

I had never heard the sound of a live music show sound so crisp before this jazz ensemble before. Although a lot of credit should be given to the musicians themselves, the building is clearly an engineering masterpiece. It's supposed to be the second-most acoustically sound building in the world--the sound of the auditorium I was in is so sweet that you don't need a microphone since one's voice can project itself from the stage to the balcony and reverberate throughout the entire place. The seats were also created by precision-driven architects--they have three different sizes of seats in order to fit people of different builds. Oh, and the cushions on the seats have the same density as the human body(I guess engineers love their easter eggs).

Overall, it was a refreshing experience that exposed me to a side of higher education that I was largely oblivious to. The people were smart as hell and just as nice as a liberal arts crowd--they simply had a different, more practical way of looking at the world compared to the creative and philosophical mentality of the liberal arts world.