Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus Top Questions

No, professors do not usually know your name. My favorite class is Operations Management because we get to look at all aspects of my major, Industrial Engineering, so I find it very interesting. My least favorite class was a computer science class because I hate coding. Students study all of the time. I would say I spend at least 20 hours a week studying. Class participation is not common in engineering classes. One of the things I love about Georgia Tech are the intellectual conversations I have with almost everyone outside of class. There is a small bit of competitiveness, but it is usually everyone against the professor. Almost everyone is willing to help others out in class. The most unique class I have taken was a history of China class that I took while studying abroad in Singapore. I had never learned so much about another country before, and it really opened my eyes to how others live and think in different parts of the world. My major is Industrial Engineering and Georgia Tech is considered the best school in the nation in Industrial Engineering. The curriculum is awesome because you can focus on logistics, manufacturing, quality control, etc. or you can just take an assortment of classes from the department. Our senior design is extremely challenging because you work with a real client, such as Red Bull or UPS, and fix a problem or design a new system for some portion of their business. No, I don't spend time with professors outside of class. I really like our academic requirements. Georgia Tech definitely trains you for you career.

No, rarely do professors learn your name. Most of the class sizes, especially your first two years, are very large. My favorite class was ME 2110 Creative Decisions and Designs, there were no tests, you were given tasks and had to build contraptions to perform those tasks. There are too many to list for least favorite. Students study too much, its way to stressful. Class participation is not common, classes are too large. Always intellectual conversations outside of class. I do not spend time with professors outside of class. The academic requirements are high enough. It claims to be geared toward getting a job, but to me, its just about how well you can take a test, so unless your job requires tests, where you can only use what knowledge you have in your head, and no calculators, then its not preparing me very well.

Most professors do not know your name Most students study between 4 and 6 hours per day in total for all of their classes. Class participation is common for few students.

Academics at Georgia Tech are extremely rigorous, to say the least. GPAs are very low for freshmen and sophomores; either students study a lot and they simply don't do well, or they study very little and they don't do well as a result. I think it's a combination of the two. There are certainly a lot of younger students who aren't used to the rigorous and competitive atmosphere at GT and so they underestimate what their professors and fellow classmates expect from them. I used to think doing well here was a function of the amount of work and studying I put in, but I quickly realized you can study for hours and hours and still bomb a test. Succeeding at Georgia Tech takes a lot of hard work AND a knack for knowing exactly what professors are looking for on exams and projects. It's also important to know where to go and who to talk to in order to find answers to the tough questions. I majored in biomedical engineering, which was one of the most rigorous majors at Tech and seemed to have the greatest number of overachievers (pre-meds). I thought I was hot stuff in high school, but when I came to Tech, I could barely scrounge an above-average grade on even an "easy" exam. Things got much better as I started getting into my major classes and as I learned "the system," but classes were still challenging up to the end. Ostensibly, it would seem like Georgia Tech students work together on homeworks and projects and studying because they're "all in the same boat", in that most people study a difficult major. But in reality, while there is a lot of camaraderie in academics, people are still very competitive and they will do whatever is needed to ace the class and get a recommendation letter from the professor. That's life. I was fortunate enough to take advantage of the undergraduate research opportunities at Georgia Tech. It was a good way for me to use my coursework for a real-world application, and I would recommend it to anyone. My major didn't allow me to take too many electives without prolonging graduation, but I took one great class on the history of city planning in the school of Architecture. The professor, D. Allen, was probably the most engaging teacher of any class I took. Most of the other professors were approachable, but I wouldn't quite go so far as to call many of them "welcoming." They answered questions and held open office hours, but many of them also headed research labs and so you could tell teaching undergraduates was not a top priority. But many took the time to prepare thoughtful lessons and offered to stay after class to answer questions. I remember one professor in particular, R. Gleason, who used to stay with a group of four or five of us for at least 20 minutes after every class to answer When I came to college, I expected lounging at a coffee shop, discussing politics and other world issues with my coffee-drinking college buddies. Don't we all expect something like that? The reality is much different. It was rare that I had intellectual conversations with anyone but my closest friends. But as I visited friends from other schools, I noticed they didn't really live out my fantasy either. I can't exactly blame Georgia Tech for this. That said, if you love talking about computers, there's always someone to converse with. The education at Georgia Tech is definitely geared toward getting a job as opposed to going to graduate or medical school. There were monthly career fairs and a huge cooperative education office (Google it). But that's not to say it's impossible to go to graduate school from Tech, it's just a little more difficult because the GPAs tend to be lower.

Some professors know my name, but it depends on the class and the size of it. My favorite class this semester is my Clinical Research Practicum class. We learn about clinical research and perform clinical studies for 8 hours a week in the Grady Hospital ECC. Least favorite class is my Circuits lab. Students study about 10 hours a week. No, class participation is not common. Yes, Georgia Tech students have intellectual conversations outside of class. We may study a lot, but we know whats going on in the world. Students here are very competitive. My most unique class had to be my English II class. My major is Biomedical Engineering and I love my major. My major is very young and therefore the department is still being developed and refined. I do spend time with professors outside of class. I think the academic requirements at Tech are a little too stringent, but it helps to push students to do their best. Education at Georgia Tech is geared towards getting a job and passing entrance exams.

Tech is a hard school. The classes are challenging but the reward is great. Having a degree from Tech looks better in the eyes of future bosses then a local/state university.

Do professors know your name? That depends on the class. The largest lecture I ever had had 203 people in it, but every semester I took a class where I was 1 of 12. That allows you to be very personal if you choose to be with your professors. I say if you choose to be because it's up to you whether you visit their office or see them after class or not. This is regardless of class size. Also, after years of classes, you start to know the admins and professors of your college, whether you took a class with them or not. While walking around the College of Architecture, I came to recognize about as many professors as I did students. One thing you have to realize about Georgia Tech is it quite often takes students longer than 4 years to finish undergraduate studies. It took me an extra fall semester, and the same is true for many of my friends. A lot more are still there this spring. Classes are very challenging, and quite often people take minimum hours to be considered a full time student, making it take additional semesters. A poor freshman or sophomore year from the shock of the difficult classes could set you behind a little, or perhaps you changed majors halfway through. Intellectual conversations of all types can be heard outside classes. My closest friends aren't within the college of architecture, but are engineers. Very often my CS friend would come home excited about some practical aplication of some theory he just learned about, or my EE friend would show off some new "toy." Being the only Architect among the group, I shared my knowledge whenever the course of conversation led to such discussions of buildings and city planning. Recently I half guided some friends through a famous house we visited that I had learned about but had never been to.

Since I'm in the school of Liberal Arts, most of my professors know my name. I love my Marketing classes and I always feel a sense of encouragement from them academically. Georgia Tech is very unique in that I hear people talk about calculus and physics problems over lunch and hold very intellectual conversations all the time. The most unique class I have taken was called Environment Ecocritic which dealt with the issue of the way things in the environment are placed and how that effects our everyday life. My major, STAC, is one of the most unique majors and the most flexible. I study classes anything from Literature to media to philosophy. I know my counselor by name and most of my teachers. I spend time with my professors outside of class through research and through the different organizations in which they participate.The requirement at Georgia Tech are very strenuous, time consuming, and difficult. The education at Georgia Tech is highly geared toward getting a job and companies from major corporations on campus are here many times a month and hire Georgia Tech students over other universities because of the quality of the student.

You are a letter on a grade book but you learn a hell of a lot.