Rochester Institute of Technology

Rochester Institute of Technology is a private technological university serving Rochester, New York. It grew from the Rochester Athenaeum of 1829 and the Mechanics Institute of 1885; the merged school took the RIT name in 1944 and moved in 1968 from downtown to a suburban campus in Henrietta. Its defining structures are a cooperative-education system that places students in paid industry terms, and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, established by Congress in 1965 as a college of RIT.

Academic work is organized through colleges of engineering, computing and information sciences, science, art and design, business, health sciences and technology, and liberal arts, plus NTID. Graduate strength lies in imaging science, computer science, cybersecurity, engineering, photography, and microsystems. The Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences are the schools and laboratories graduate students use most.

RIT enrolls about 20,000 students, including several thousand at graduate level and a large international group in computing and engineering. Faculty number in the hundreds of full-time members. Alumni work in technology, imaging, and public life; they include software engineer John Resig and former New York lieutenant governor Robert Duffy.

Graduate study is mainly master's degrees, with doctorates in fields such as imaging science, computing, and engineering. Programs mix coursework with projects or dissertations and often keep co-op or internships. The calendar is semester-based. Doctoral students more often hold assistantships; many master's students are self-funded. Students live on or near the Henrietta campus, with Rochester's optics and imaging employers a short drive away.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Rochester Institute of Technology lists 87 graduate programs across 37 subjects: 75 master's programs and 8 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in operations research & management science, communication, media & journalism and business & management.