Cal Poly or VTech?
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Anonymous
DP, but it is indeed annoying when someone writes, "VTech." No one says this. No one. |
Anonymous
+1 I also have a student at VT and it's the perfect distance for us - far away enough to be really "away," but close enough to get to in an emergency. Plus, beautiful location. |
Anonymous
VT is also in the mountains. And Cal Poly also has football. |
Anonymous
It has football but it's not the same big game culture as VT. I googled it - average Cal Poly football attendance last year was about 7k per game. VT was 64k. Sports are just a much bigger aspect of the culture at VT. Both great schools and a lot of similarities but also differences. |
Anonymous
| Clay Poly 10x over. It’s unique and a gem of a school. That is if you have some $$ to help make transportation less of a PITA… the location is SO amazing but getting there is annoying and expensive. |
Anonymous
Agreed. Look, VT has an acceptance rate nearly 2x that of Cal Poly. Aside from that overall differentiator, Cal Poly is competitive enough that even changing majors is extremely difficult, to the point that there are specific majors that have specific acceptance rates below 5%. I’m sorry - comparing these two schools is no different than comparing Stanford and UVA. Are there applicants who choose UVA over Stanford? Sure. Are those individuals making a terrible decision. Of course they are. |
Anonymous
Was there any doubt at all about what OP meant? No, there wasn’t. So let it be; no one died and made you the arbiter of message board vocabulary. |
Anonymous
+1 I manage to hold in snarky posts about it, but totally understand the urge to post them. The tech toy company is my first thought every time I see VTech used. The school simply isn’t called that. |
Anonymous
| This has to be a joke. Cal Poly, no question. |
Anonymous
+1 Agreed, maybe this is a new parent who is new to the lingo. Stop scolding anonymous people on the Internet. |
Anonymous
But why? What are your thoughts? |
Anonymous
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PP Cal Poly alum with VT student - to add to my earlier comments after thinking about this for a bit...
I still think the biggest determinant is where you think you'd want to be post-college. CP is 83% CA residents and most stay in the region post-college. VT is 64% in-state but also has a significant % from MD, NJ, PA so just as regional as CP. I don’t think there’s any validity to saying it’s “10x better” than VT, unless your goal is to work in Silicon Valley. However, if totally agnostic on location, I think one thing CP does far, far better than VT is freshman orientation. I was very disappointed with my son's experience at VT since I was expecting the kind of experience of CP. VT's approach to that 1st freshman week is to put on a lot of activities and tell the students, here's a bunch of stuff, go have fun and make friends. Which is great for some, but for a lot of kids it is overwhelming and hard to make connections. I found my son tended to get closer to his HS friends in that situation rather than push past the discomfort to make new friends (he did eventually make a wider group of friends). The VT parent facebook group is always full of parent concerns that their student doesn’t know anyone, doesn’t have someone to eat dinner with, etc. Cal Poly has done WOW (Week of Welcome) for decades and it is a completely different approach. Students are put into small groups with two student leaders and attend college events, do things off campus together, eat your meals together, etc. For most students, the WOW group is your first group of friends without having to stretch yourself too much. You always have someone to eat dinner with. If you don’t show up, someone will come looking for you. And the group leaders are an easy point of contact to ask questions and good at encouraging students to connect with different things on campus. The EC that ended up being my main social group for the rest of college came about because my WOW leader was in it and encouraged this very shy freshman to try out. If you have a quieter, introverted student, I would lean much more toward Cal Poly purely on the basis of a better introduction to college, putting you on a better path to make the most of the opportunities. https://orientation.calpoly.edu/wow/home |
Anonymous
| Cal Poly SLO had record applications this year and lowest admit rate at 9.2 - and contrary to what one person said above, one reason for the surge, I suspect, is actually because of their access to internships and research. Quarterly career fairs on campus with hundreds of companies. Their students do very well with internships and jobs. I cannot speak to Va Tech. |
Anonymous
| Are you already into Cal Poly or are you a junior? If you’re in congratulations… I pick that for the location but also access to research opportunities and general lifestyle and club scene. Kids there are happy. |
Anonymous
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Cal Poly is more hands on, very focused on the undergrad experience since there are few postgrads there, plus weather, nice college town and you are still somewhat plugged into west coast job scene.
The only downside is travel and also keep in mind that in quarter system (going away in a year or two), your student ends in June and begins in September. So that can impact internships or summer family travel. Big CPSLO fan here so take that with a grain of salt. If your student plans to remain in DMV after I can see how Virginia Tech would be the choice. |