Engineering is on the Rise

By now it’s clear that the 2014 merger between New York University and the Polytechnic Institute has had positive ramifications. Aspiring engineers are taking note; in 2015 the number of students seeking entry to the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering jumped 30% over the previous year—a university record.

Dean of Engineering Katepalli Sreenivasan explained, “Polytechnic has long been a storied institution—a place that welcomes students from all backgrounds and walks of life, the alma mater of a third of the engineers in New York City, a school whose bachelor’s degree recipients have an earning potential that ranks among the best in the nation. Poly’s tradition in innovation, invention and entrepreneurship is legendary. Its merger with a research university of NYU’s stature has made it a matchless environment for anyone wishing to pursue engineering in all of its variety. Students are realizing that this is the place to be whether they want to improve medical instrumentation as a bioengineer, help bring about next-generation wireless technology as an electrical engineer, design games as a computer engineer, or improve infrastructural resiliency as a civil engineer—just to name a few examples.”

Among the new opportunities open to students and faculty at the School of Engineering are the opportunities to work at the new multi-school Media and Games Network (MAGNET), which bridges the gap between technology and culture, and the Governance Lab, whose researchers address the question of how technology can create a more transparent and representative government.

Another factor impossible to ignore: the School of Engineering’s unbeatable location in Downtown Brooklyn, one of the fastest growing centers of tech innovation in the nation and the locus of the city’s burgeoning start-up economy. The school’s thriving incubator system and focus on entrepreneurship are major draws for fledgling engineers aiming to provide practical and marketable solutions for pressing world problems.

Part of the leap in applications is also unquestionably the result of NYU’s hardworking admissions officers, who fanned out to more than 1,000 high schools around the globe to spread the word that the vital field of engineering had returned to NYU after a decades-long hiatus. “The exposure for the Polytechnic School of Engineering is truly unprecedented,” NYU's Dean of Admissions Shawn Abbott explained, “and we are seeing that play out in this year's record-breaking applicant pool."

The news of the School of Engineering’s record candidate pool emerged as NYU announced that the university as a whole had logged 60,322 applications for freshman admission to the Class of 2019, marking the eighth year in a row of record applications and a 15% increase over the previous year.