Welcome to Purdue University!

So you want to be an engineer? Engineering is an extremely rewarding and challenging career, but to get there first you have to graduate college, and the first step of that is surviving your freshman year. We are all upperclassmen in Purdue’s engineering program and we are making this blog to share the things we wished we knew as freshmen. You may not realize just how many things in your life change when you move into college and this guide covers them all. Everything from freshmen classes, dorms, food, budgeting, and even the weather at Purdue. Reading this guide will give you the knowledge to not only survive but thrive during your freshman year at Purdue. Boiler Up!

SI Sessions

Sometimes, it is easy to get overwhelmed with classes. Know that you are not alone, and many engineers initially struggle with balancing course load and getting settled on campus. There are many resources available for the hard classes, and one of those resources is SI Sessions. SI, or Supplementary Instruction, are weekly evening workshops led by a past student who did well in the class. These sessions involve interactive activities that help reinforce the material learned in class. Depending on the SI leader, these sessions may or may resonate with you, so make sure to try a few different leaders out if your class offers more than one SI leader. Some particularly difficult “weeder” classes include Calculus II (MA162 or MA166) and Physics (PHYS172). A good way to survive these are to attend SI sessions.

Money

The commodity that every college student seems to lack: spare change. Here, we will describe ways to be smart about your money to get through college and still keep your wallet thick.

1. Know where the money in your tuition statement goes. A large portion of what you pay for may be for room and board. A key consideration is the decision to live on campus or off campus. Often times, it is cheaper to live off campus. However, most freshmen elect to live on campus because of the convenient location it offers as well as the ability to meet new people when starting out in college. Still, dorms are priced differently based upon the amenities it offers. 
2. Meal plan: key word 'plan'. When living on campus, students, with the exception of a few apartment-style dorms, must purchase a meal plan. Don’t purchase a meal plan that you realistically won’t use. For example, for a person who eats cereal in the morning in their room and 2 other meals a day, the 13 meal plan is sufficient. The unlimited meal plan only really makes financial sense if you eat every single meal in the dining halls, including breakfast, or you like to eat more than 3 meals a day. Do the math and choose a plan based on your personal realistic habits.
3. Keep a track of your budget and spending. Many meal plans include dining dollars, which are paid for already. Make sure to use them up before the end of the semester. Often times, commodities like coffee can be paid for with dining dollars at on-campus locations which will reduce out-of-pocket expenses.

Food

Food is an integral part of life, and there are many locations on and near campus where you can grab things to eat. In this section, we will detail the various places you can visit, what is the “speciality”, and other miscellaneous details that you should know about each location.

Dining Courts: These are the big cafeterias located throughout Purdue’s campus. We have five main dining courts: Wiley, Windsor, Ford, Hillenbrand, and Earhart. These can be accessed through using a “meal swipe”, using “dining dollars”, or by paying real money. Once inside, it is an all-you-can-eat buffet style offering various types of food. Each dining court has certain food options that are popular and stand out. Earhart offers a “make your own pizza” on some days and “make your own stir-fry”. Wiley is known for the meats and cookies. Windsor offers an entire section of vegetarian options. Ford has asian food and pizza. Hillenbrand hosts “Hillenbrunch” on Sundays. Beware of long lunch lines at Ford, Wiley, and Windsor due to close proximity to academic buildings.

On The Go / Dining Dollars: Often times, we are too busy to have a nice sit-down meal. Purdue offers many good choices located on campus for those times. “On the go” is located at Ford, Windsor, and Earhart, and enables you to use a meal swipe to but a meal to-go. In addition, there are many small cafes like Starbucks, Au Bon Pain, and restaurants in the PMU where a-la-carte options can be purchased using dining dollars. Occasionally, some of these locations also accept meal swipes. Download the “Purdue Meals” application to see full menus and receive notifications on when certain places accept meal swipes. Also make sure to budget your dining dollars, it’s easy to run out and still have half the semester left to go.

Chauncey: This is the commercial area just to the east of Purdue’s campus, along State Street. Chauncey offers a wide selection of restaurants for when you might be tired of dining court food, or on Sunday night when the dining halls are closed. Fast food chains like Subway, Taco Bell, Jimmy Johns, and Chipotle are found along with nice sit-down places like Basil Thai.

Grubhub/Doordash: This is for the times that you’re too busy working on an engineering project. This is a way to order food from locations in Chauncey and beyond, and have it delivered right outside your building on campus. It’s perfect to power through the 3am exam grind.

Career Fairs

In engineering it is very important to get experiences outside of the classroom to show that you are well rounded and can apply what you learned at school. One of the best ways to build your resume to be an attractive candidate once you graduate is to get an internship with a company in your field. I know it might seem early to start thinking about getting internships and it’s true that many freshmen are not able to find an internship for their first summer, but there are opportunities out there specifically for freshmen and sophomores and starting early gets you just that much more prepared for next year and the next set of career fairs.

Career fairs are events where representatives from companies come out to talk to students, collect resumes, and conduct interviews. According to the Center for Career Oppertunities’ (CCO) website, Purdue holds over 30 career fairs every year. Most of those are divided by major, so most engineering disciplines will have their own career fair in the fall. As a freshman, you can stop by the career fair for the engineering discipline you are interested in to see what companies are represented. From my experience in AAE, the Aerospace career fair has a relatively small selection of companies represented, but the lines to talk to representatives are shorter than at the larger career fairs. The three most important career fairs for freshmen are Industrial Roundtable (IR), EXPO, and the Professional Practice Days. Some relevant links are listed at the bottom of this section.

Industrial Roundtable and EXPO

Industrial Roundtable (IR) is Purdue’s largest career fair. It spans two days in the fall semester and hosts over 400 companies on Memorial Mall. Before the career fair, some companies hold seminars to help you get to know the company better and to answer general questions about the experience working there. These seminars can be helpful if you are unsure of what a company does and want to get a better idea of the company’s culture.



EXPO is another large career fair that hosts over 160 companies. Though it is not as large as IR, EXPO is mainly focused on STEM fields so a larger percentage of companies there will be in your field. While IR is held in the Fall semester, EXPO takes place in early Spring semester.

How to Prepare: When going to IR or EXPO, you want to make a plan ahead of time. Think about which companies you want to talk to and plan the order in which you want to talk to them. Keep in mind that some companies are only at IR for one of the two days, so make sure you look at the schedule while making your plan. If you want to talk to a large/popular company (Google, SpaceX, Cummins, etc.), you will likely end up waiting in line for at least 30 minutes and up to 2 hours and you will be told to apply online once you get to the front. The best thing you can do for a company like this is to have filled out the online application before IR so if they ask, you will appear well prepared and interested in the company. While it is attractive to just talk to the larger companies, do not overlook the small companies with no lines. They’re recruiters tend to value the individual interactions more, so a good conversation is more likely to score you an interview with a small company.

How to Dress: Another thing to think about before the career fair is what you’re going to wear and what you’re going to bring with you. The dress code is business casual, but it is not uncommon to see people dressed in professional clothing. If you are unsure what business casual looks like, take a look at the graphic below. It gives a good explanation of the difference between business casual and professional. If a suit and tie is all you have or what you feel most comfortable wearing, that is fine, but one thing to consider is what the weather will be like. Most years, it tends to be quite hot and sunny which might make a suit jacket a bit unbearable.

What to Bring: When considering what to bring, one thing you do not want to be carrying around while talking to recruiters is your backpack. Both IR and EXPO provide a backpack drop off area, but it is accessible to everyone. If you are not going to be comfortable leaving your backpack sitting on a table with a couple hundred other backpacks, don’t bring it. You should bring a black portfolio (or folder if you don’t have a portfolio), at least double the number of resumes as companies you are planning on talking to, some paper to take notes on, and a writing utensil. It is useful to be able to take notes so that you can jot down any questions or interesting information you learn about the company.

Professional Practice Days

What is a Co-Op: Co-Ops are different than internships and should not be entered on a whim. When you agree to do a Co-Op, you are agreeing to work with the same company 3 to 5 times over a 2 to 3 year time frame. A Co-Op guarantees you at least a year of work experience before you graduate, but it will push back your graduation by at least a semester, typically a full year. A typical Co-Op schedule involves alternating between school and work sessions, so if you work in the summer, you’d take classes in the fall then work again in the spring. This alternating gives you a break from school but does mean that you are moving about once every 5 months. The schedule is generally not rigid, so you can talk to your employer about doing 2 work sessions in a row or staying longer at school. The Co-Op program can be very flexible depending on your company.

Flex Co-Op: If 3 years with the same company sounds like too much of a commitment, there is a new program that OPP offers called a Flex Co-Op. In a Flex Co-Op, you commit to working 2 sessions with the same employer. After those two sessions, you can decide to either stay with the same employer or switch to a different employer to finish the rest of your work sessions. This allows you reevaluate the company you are with to decide if that work is what you want to keep doing.

The Professional Practice Days takes place in February and is a career fair solely focused on Co-Ops. The Professional Practice Days fair is much smaller than either IR or EXPO, typically less than 100 companies. This can mean that there can be limited options for some majors. Another big difference between Professional Practice Days and other career fairs is that the it requires you to post your resume and other important information to their online portal a couple weeks in advance of the fair. This is because some of the companies that come to interview students don’t attend the physical fair. To make sure you’re ready for this, the Office of Professional Practice (OPP) will organize information and prep nights right around the start of spring semester, so keep an eye on your email for the dates and times of these events.


List of Purdue career fairs: https://www.cco.purdue.edu/Employers/CareerFairs#FallCareerFairs
IR information: https://www.purdueesc.org/careerfairs/ir/studentcenter/information
EXPO information: https://www.purdueesc.org/careerfairs/expo
Office of Professional Practice: https://opp.purdue.edu/
Flex Co-Op program: https://opp.purdue.edu/programs/Flex_Co-Op.html

Weather

If you are from the Midwest, you can skip over this. You probably know what you’re getting yourself into. For those of you not from the Midwest, here are a few things you need to be aware of:

Tornadoes: While Indiana is not in tornado alley, tornadoes are still a common occurrence here. If there is imminent danger from a tornado, sirens around campus will go off to let you know to get inside on the lowest floor and away from windows. If at any point you see the sky turn a dark green color, get inside as soon as possible. If the sky turns green it often means a tornado will form soon. Note: The tornado sirens are tested on the first Saturday of every month to make sure they still work. So if you happen to be walking around campus some sunny Saturday morning and hear the sirens go off, it’s just a test.

Humid Summers: Indiana has quite hot, humid summers. We often have a few days in the summer where the temperature reaches 100°F. This isn’t as hot as some other areas, but what can make it feel really bad is the humidity. After April, the humidity is always over 50%, typically hovering around 75-90%. This can make it feel about 10 degrees warmer than it actually is. In the summer, it is important to drink lots of water and to stay in the shade as much as possible.

Windy Winters: There are many places that have worse winters than West Lafayette, but if you are from a temperate climate, you need to know that it does consistently get below 0°F here in the winder. If you grew up in an area where you did not need a heavy winter jacket, you should buy one now. Once fall comes around it is also common for there to be wind gusts of over 20 mph which can make it feel over 10 degrees colder than it actually is. We also tend to get a couple inches of snow a couple times a year. Classes will probably not be cancelled, so a pair of waterproof boots is a good investment.

In Summary: The weather here in Indiana can be unpredictable and varies widely from season to season. Make sure you have appropriate clothing for all of the seasons. If you are not familiar with Midwest weather, you should find a weather app you like and check it daily.

Clubs and Organizations

One of the benefits of Purdue’s large campus is a lot of people with different interests and hobbies. If you are passionate about something, chances are there is a club at Purdue dedicated to that. The same goes for engineering. If you are interested in learning about the real life applications of the things you learned in class or if you want to be able to make something, or if you want to meet more like minded people then clubs are the way to go. There are clubs that focus on specific engineering disciplines and clubs that incorporate all of them. For example, there is an electrical engineering club that builds high speed electric carts and a club called the Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE, where any engineering major can join and contribute to a vehicle build. There are also honor societies within every engineering major that invite a certain percentage of the top students to join. These clubs usually do less projects and focus more on career development, event organizing, and fundraising. Even if clubs related to engineering aren’t your thing, Purdue has over 1000 clubs to choose from. More details about each and every one can be found here https://boilerlink.purdue.edu/Organizations.

Many students use clubs as resume builders which can be good, but only if you enjoy the club. Don't feel pressured into joining a bunch of clubs that are vaguely interesting just for career fair points, because honestly it doesn't help that much unless you have a leadership position within the club. This shows interest as well as commitment. Just make sure when you join a club that you do it justice, meaning make sure you have time throughout the week to dedicate towards it and actually show up to the meetings. Don't be that guy that joins a bunch of clubs just to put it on their resume, recruiters will see right through it. Besides that try not to think of how being a member of this club will affect my employment opportunities, join clubs because you want to. With enough interest in a club, leadership opportunities will open up and that always looks good on a resume; no matter the club.