VISIT: Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

Several 2008 STES graduates applied to Purdue and were extremely impressed with the school, so I decided it was worth going to learn more about this school I’d already heard so much about. For the most up-to-date information, you can always visit their website at http://www.purdue.edu.

I had a great time visiting the Purdue campus. It’s about a two-hour drive from the Michigan-Indiana border, so it was a bit of a trek southward, but the trip was well worth it. West Lafayette may not be what you envision when you think of Indiana. This part of Indiana is anything but empty flat; I drove through enormous rolling hills covered in cornfields and forests and tiny towns selling fresh strawberries by the carton. Purdue is on the banks of the mighty Wabash River just a stone’s throw from the Tippecanoe battlefield. This battle is to Indiana third-graders what the Battle of the Alamo is to Texas students: it’s the big battle that altered all state history that came afterwards. However, the difference with Texas history is that there are a lot of other battles to talk about. Indiana history is a lot less action-packed after Tippecanoe.

Anyway, back to West Lafayette. It’s about two hours from a really major city, but it’s a nice small city that surrounds and serves the university. People are friendly, parking is easy and cheap, and the campus is really lovely. While the campus is very large—it covers nearly 2500 acres—it’s organized into small units that make it feel small. The academic buildings are concentrated into several small quads on the east side of campus. As our tour guide says, this is great when you have multiple classes in one day: it’s never more than a ten-minute walk across the campus from any class to another. Dorms are concentrated to the north and west of the academic buildings, and there is abundant housing. Students are not required to live on campus, but many choose to in the first year. The campus is further surrounded by apartments, condos, and homes for rent to students. It's a very friendly campus and it was remarkable how quickly you could move between bustling city life and peaceful campus life within just a few minutes' walk.

The big things to know about Purdue this fall are some small changes to their admissions process. The deadline for applying for ALL MERIT-BASED SCHOLARSHIP—that is, those that DO NOT CONSIDER FINANCIAL NEED—is November 15. This means that you must submit your admission application online by that date in order to be considered for merit-based scholarships. This is very worthwhile, since Purdue can be very generous with money. Additionally, all applications submitted by this date will have their decisions posted online on the Purdue website by 5 PM EST on Friday, December 5th—the Friday after Thanksgiving. This means that, if you apply to Purdue, you’ll know your admission decision very early. If you’re admitted, it can be a very nice early Christmas present to yourself to know that you’ve definitely got a place to go to college in fall 2009.

Two things that impressed me about Purdue were its freshman programs and its co-op program. Many freshmen agonize about what they should major in, and this process can be especially stressful when students are interested in TIME-CONSUMING majors like engineering. Purdue allows students to enroll in the first year of studies program before choosing a major that they’ll stick to for four years. This helps students get a lot of their basic core requirements out of the way before specializing in a major. It's a great way for students to gain a real-world sense of the things they want to study and then enter into those programs better prepared and better informed.

One of the most special things about Purdue’s renowned business and engineering programs is their co-op program. Through this program, Purdue students will leave the campus every other semester or so to work for major companies around the country including NASA, IBM, Schlumberger, and many other major corporations and agencies. Students graduate from the university after five years, and they have a total of four years of college and about 18 months of employment history by the time they receive their degree. This is a huge boon to students as they search for jobs after college. While their contemporaries at other schools will have only a degree, they’ll have more than a year of work experience to offer their potential employers. Many of these co-op programs lead to post-graduation job offers.