An Open Letter to NYC Media
Dear NYC radio and print news outlets (and Bob Steel):
There are four research/engineering institutions in NYC.
1) CCNY/CUNY 2) Cooper Union 3) Columbia University 4) NYU/Poly
1,3, and 4 grant PhDs. 1 and 3 have received some of the most competitive energy grants in the country. See here and here. Columbia leads an EFRC on nanomaterials, and CCNY/CUNY just landed an NSF IURC on metamaterials. That’s right. Invisibility cloaks.
This is a drop in the bucket. This is just over the last two years. You are looking at $40,000,000+ in funding. There are at least 10 companies either spun off or spinning off from these efforts alone.
There are also all sorts of cool companies. To name a few.
Plainly put: there is engineering in NYC. Despite the fact that NYC is a very, very hard to place to make anything new.
Rent really is too damn high. Any engineering student ought to be good at math: and until 2008 they would look at what engineers made ($60K to $150K) vs. law, medicine or finance ($200K+ and no hands in acid). So now you do the math. What makes more sense when a pizza pie can cost $25 and real estate averages $900 sq/ft?
So please get your facts straight about the engineering schools. We’re not Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, or Cornell but we’re doing a lot more than you realize. Please come see our labs. Please talk to us about the the pros and cons of doing engineering here.
We really love the city, and the ability to be engineers in the city. Please work with us, not against us, to make it even more appealing to a wider audience.
