Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
RPI hockeystick-toting puck mascot
Motto	Semper Caelebs (Always Celibate)
School type	Private
Location	Gangland, New York, U.S.
Campus	Urban, no parking
Endowment	One check, written by Richard Nixon, for "All the money on Earth"

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or The 'Tute is a private university in Troy, New York. RPI is widely known as a ball-buster school, a phrase that speaks both to the difficulty of the curriculum and the gender composition of the Institute. The school, despite false advertising in the form of pamphlets sent to blissfully unaware college-bound high-school students, is actually about 70% male and 30% female. RPI students are famous for their hard-bitten cynicism, Herculean tolerance for alcohol, and deep-green color, which they gain via secret rituals involving isotopes.

History

"Rippy" takes its title as the oldest tech school in America (apart from some tech schools on the other side of the river) as a badge of pride. The school's mission is to promote "the proper application of stupidity to the common purposes of life." It takes credit for every technological feat of the past century, including the Moon Landing and Skynet.

Amos Eaton conducted an experiment to establish an all-female school in Troy, NY in late 1824, but his experiment went horribly wrong and what escaped from his lab was an engineering school that was destined to become all-male as surely as the Fourier transform decomposes functions into a frequency spectrum. The first classes were held in a sausage factory until the move into less tasty facilities on top of the largest hill that could be found, where buildings were constructed from calculus textbooks and cemented with pure misery and despondence. Since that auspicious beginning, the school grew to include new dorms and, when females did eventually arrive at RPI, the Greene Building, where all of the girls are taught and, not at all coincidentally, where the architecture program makes its home.

Academics

The University of Chicago has an unofficial saying that "this is where fun comes to die." This is, of course, a load of bullshit. Fun goes to U Chicago for a vacation to get away from nearby Cleveland. RPI is a veritable fun-Buchenwald. The science of funnihilation at RPI has been so completely perfected that an entire school has been devoted to its dissemination among the student body and the world at large. This school is the School of Engineering. Here students can study various methods of fun annihilation- most notably electrical, nuclear, aeronautical, and mechanical.

There is also a School of Management, where mark-ass bitches that wash out of the harder programs can come and still get a degree. Moving from a fun-annihilation degree to a degree in management is generally known as "Boarding the M-train", or "averting your own premature death by overwork and crushing depression." For those in the harder schools, there is still solace. Booze and anime are popular pastimes among the student body, the amount of booze consumed usually being proportional to the square root of the absolute value of the quantity (GPA minus 2).

The 'Tute Screw

The 'Tute Screw is a metaphorical screw that goes in regardless of the direction of torque applied- in other words, whichever way you turn it. It is used to refer to several ailments that afflict RPI students- namely hard classes, inept administration, expensive cost of attendance, lack of girls, and a whole rogue's gallery of other shit. The truly unique aspect of this screw is that it can never be removed or taken out even a little bit- the longer you stay, the further in the screw goes.

R.I.B.S.

Ratio-Induced Bitch Syndrome is an interesting psychosomatic phenomenon prevalent among women at RPI. It convinces the ladies that they are extremely hot because they are receiving so much attention from males. The increased attention, of course, is merely a factor of the unequal ratio of men to women and not at all relating to the hotness of the female in question. Estimated breast size swells by at least 30% and the self-perceived Hotness Quotient raises an astonishing 3 points, on average. Among the male population, the effects are dramatic. Since homosexuality is not typically an outlet for sexually frustrated males, a suspiciously high amount of keyboards are thrown out every week and the bandwidth at RPI is wholly consumed with torrenting vast, vast reams of porn.

Due to the outrageously limited amount of female population, many of the males have thrown off the traditional 10 scale for hotness of a girl. Because it is a highly logical school, they use the binary system instead. "1" is a yes and a "0" is a no. In general, a girl with a mustache is typically awarded a "0", while all others would be considered a "1."

Campus

Walker Lab

Contrary to its name, Walker Lab is the only building on campus which is absolutely, positively, not moving. It is built on the only outcropping of bedrock which appeared on the entire lower campus, and is generally used as the reference point against which all other building movement is measured.

West Hall

West Hall, also known as "West Hell", like most buildings on that side of campus is unstable. It is also the oldest and most run down building on campus and is thus home of the music and arts departments.

There is an engineering solution to every problem, and this one was no exception. The problem was, the land under the building was shifting, and there was not (and still isn't) any way to stop the earth from moving. So, long steel cables were run underground through uber cool top secret hard to find kick-you-out-of-school-if-you-try-to-trespass tunnels and tied to the foundations of the Sage boiler room. Legend has it that there were originally four cables, and that only three remain, one of them having been cut through long ago by student dissidents.

Folsom Library

The Folsom Library was designed by a man who first thought he was designing a parking garage and then thought it was an office complex. He only later found out it was supposed to be a library. This fact is most obvious from the way the floors sink inwards from the walls, due to the weight of shelf after shelf of reference materials, most of which haven't been touched since the single grad student who needed them graduated or dropped out in the mid 1980s.

Jonsson Engineering Center

Dominant new engineering building until the late 1980's. Famous site of for egg drops, pumpkin tosses (although the Approach is used as well), flat bottles of Mountain Dew drops, and tossing water filled condoms over the edge.

EMPAC

A newly constructed building on campus, EMPAC, or Electro-Magnetic Projectile Accelerator Cannon, is used by the Institute's Staff to control the weather for various formal functions on campus, namely alumni weekends and admissions events, or various celebrations. Shaped like a giant Ark, it is theorized that the building also functions as an emergency escape method from Troy, NY. The building's power derives mostly from siphoning funding away from campus laboratories and research.