Campus Life: Why does Poly need money?

Posted: 12/22/08 10:36 PM

To throw awesome parties. Of course. duh.

Posted: 12/22/08 11:34 PM

I have no idea, but they constantly call my parents' house to beg for money. I happen to be visiting for the holidays and answered the phone; when they asked for me, I responded "she doesn't live here anymore."

What's hysterical is I graduated in 2004-- you'd think anyone still living with their parents 4 years after graduation would not have the means or desire to donate to their alma mater. I guess they need to hit up every angle regardless of the associated futility...

Posted: 12/23/08 10:24 AM

The called me maybe a month ago and I explained to the guy that I was planning on going back to Poly for grad school. He kept asking me if I wanted to donate. I kept trying to explain to him that it would be silly for me to donate money for students' scholarships when I was planning on collecting that money myself.

Posted: 12/23/08 10:42 AM

They call me every new year. I am expecting a call from them in a few week.

Posted: 12/23/08 12:15 PM

I'll answer his question:

They use the money for scholarships, facilities, parties, etc. School's use tuition to also pay for that stuff, but you do realize that it costs schools millions of dollars to run, right? They also need to pay for professors' salaries, advertising, etc.

Yes, NYU has lots of money, but a lot of that money also comes from donations from former students. There are a lot of people out there who will gladly donate some money to their Alma Mater, just not a lot at poly; mainly because people who went here usually hated the school and don't want anything to do with it anymore. Everyone else isn't like that.

With that said, NYU is going to help poly with money, but it's not going to just give us all the money we want, they're expecting something back (maybe a repayment, maybe to improve standards of students, maybe both).

Posted: 12/23/08 10:27 PM

@floydiandroid -

I don't buy your answer. I highly doubt the money they gather from poly alumni donations will make enough of a financial impact to provide the school with "scholarships, facilities, parties, etc." Like you said, tuition pays for those things, not the couple of thousands they collect from alumni per year. If anything, it's the rich alumnis who continuously donates high amounts per year. But those alumni probably do so without being hounded.

NYU better give Poly all the money we want. Their name and reputation is on the line now. What they get in return is to retain their positive image. That alone should be reason enough for NYU to support Poly at all means.

Posted: 12/23/08 10:32 PM

@Yoshi - hahaha this is what I told them during my last phone call (yesterday):

Poly: Sir, would you like to donate $1000 to poly?
ME: hahaha, sorry but no way in hell would I ever donate to Poly.
Poly: Oh? Why not?
ME: Because they shafted me too much. I'm sure as a student, you would understand.
Poly: I see, but Poly has put out many inventors and entrepreneurs. Did you know poly alumni invented the microwave, novocaine, etc.
ME: Yes, I've seen the posters around the school. Perhaps you should call those people, they're probably millionaires.
Poly: Oh we do, but we need everyone's support. So sir, would you like to donate $500.
ME: hahaha, I'm hanging up. Goodbye.

Posted: 12/24/08 11:46 AM

A THOUSAND DOLLARS? And here I thought they would be asking for some reasonable amount, like $50 or maybe even $100. Who the fuck has that much money laying around that they'd just up and donate A THOUSAND DOLLARS because some dude from Poly called them?

That's like a week's take-home pay for most people I know. And, fuck, I dunno, but there's this whole recession thing going on, with lots of people getting laid off and people wanting to save their money in case they lose their jobs, etc.

Are they doing the whole tactic where you ask for something ridiculous, so that when you finally ask for what you wanted it seems reasonable?

Posted: 12/24/08 06:11 PM

(grrr, no reply button yet?)

They didn't ask me for a thousand, more like $50. Is that because I'm liberal arts?

Posted: 12/24/08 08:23 PM

Yeah it was definitely $1000! I could support like 30 starving children from foreign countries with that kind of money!

I think I'll say that next time. "I have $1000 for the Feed a Child Foundation, so if I give it to you, then 30 children will starve. Make your choice poly workstudy minion!"

Posted: 12/24/08 11:07 PM

They called and I explained that although I'm an alum, I am also currently a grad student and thus I'm already giving Poly thousands of dollars every semester. So their response was to ask "but can't you donate even another 50 or 100 dollars?". I repeated that I'm already paying tuition and that my money is going towards tuition, books, etc. They still kept asking me to donate at least some amount and I kept repeating that it makes no sense to pay tuition AND donate money, so they finally stopped.

I wonder if that's part of training. "I know you're already paying thousands in tuition, but don't you want to give a little more?"

I like the school and am proud of Poly, but that was ridiculous.

Posted: 12/25/08 12:57 AM

The saddest part is that the person on the other end of that phone is just another poly student, trying to make some money working while tuition drains their bank accounts.

Posted: 12/25/08 02:07 AM

nevermind, that is just retarded. I thought the whole point of an alumni donation is to give a back to the school because they helped you obtain a good education, career, etc. Obviously a grad student isn't finished with his education; many don't start careers until they finish their degrees.

I know that these are just college students reading off a script who are probably pressured to bring in as much as they can. However, the fact that they can't even be arsed to check a student's enrollment status much less remove numbers from their list that HAVEN'T BEEN VALID FOR 5 YEARS really just proves to me that Poly still hasn't ironed out their administrative bullshit. I'd certainly rather donate my money someplace that isn't going to waste a large chunk of it through "business as usual" ineptitude.

Posted: 12/30/08 01:26 AM

I was about to tell them... If I do make it to become a millionaire I will donate by the thousands... and if I do get lucky enough to turn billion I will donate in millions...
However, I find it insulting for my school to start asking me for chump change like 50 bucks like some bum in the streets... it hurts the image of the school in my mind...

Posted: 12/31/08 01:55 PM

poly needs money so poly can have famous guests come to speak at special events

Posted: 12/31/08 02:17 PM

Yea, that is how they start. Would you like to donate 1k, then 500, then 250, and so on. I usually go, how about 5 bucks?

Posted: 12/31/08 02:54 PM

It only hurts the image of the school in the eyes of people who already went there.

And frankly, that's how pretty much all organizations operate when asking for money.

Posted: 01/02/09 02:30 AM

I remember once when someone pulled a fast one on me over the phone, but that was mostly because my mom handed me the phone. Didn't realize til afterwards what happened. Sure it was legit stuff but I basically got duped into it. To this day my mom still hands me the phone when we get calls from solicitors, not because she doesn't want to talk to them or find a way to hang up or curse them off but because she's interested and wants me to sign up (though she doesn't say anything). These days the solicitors we get are like from overseas and call us up "Salaamualaikum" or speaking in our native tongue very much as if they're someone we know/family.


Case in point. Poly should outsource the donation calling people. Hire Nigerians maybe.

Posted: 01/12/09 02:44 AM

For as far as I understand from the merger documents, NYU takes up Poly's whole sovereignty and all properties without giving a penny, and Poly still operates on its own. The funniest part of the fund-raising was that they kept my home phone while my parents can't even understand English, and I'm home only during holidays and had never picked up such a call. I have an all-foreign name, maybe they automatically assumed I cannot be rich enough to give out $1k while I'm actually willing to do so if they shall have asked me and have done the fund-raising business in a more-mature way. It's a bit disappointing to receive the naive campaign letters and the donation statistics (donating $1k could already put your name on their publications); the former would simply turn away most alumni, and the latter had given us an impression that Poly had low donation rate and had possibly mistreated its students and did not help them succeed in life.

Quite frankly speaking, many Poly grads are doing well in life, and many Poly alums had great success in better schools after graduating from Poly. What's more, this school has a high acceptance rate and low requirements on need-based scholarships, which had help many financially stressed and poorly prepared students pursue a higher education and temper an engineer's mindset in them. Poly's administration is chaotic and in many aspects it's too absurd to be considered a university. Most students were either screwed up by the meanies in the school or got upset/insulted to see such absurdity, but nonetheless the school had helped people succeed in life, even though not necessarily directly.

What I see is, we do need to rebuild the school spirit and teach the students self-preservation. MIT students hate their school, but MIT is very good at self-preservation, and its grads are all very thankful to both the education and the brand name that follows, because they succeed in life for both the ability and the name, thus they also spontaneously helps preserve this holy image. The downside is the admission competitiveness and thus the lesser accessibility to the general public. I did see a similar kind of sentiment from the older Poly alumni such as the ones who had graduated before 1980, and those people were generally nice and excited to see me as a Poly grad and wanted to keep in contact. The younger generations, however, were generally lesser excited to see their alumni peers and some were even hesitant to admit their Poly experience, because they felt like they got nothing good out of it. In terms of achievement in life, the younger ones are actually no worse than the older ones, although they are fewer in percentage. What I feel is that, we shall keep this Poly hate among the students and alums, and tell the world Poly is great and Poly grads are competent and successful. A school image is kept by not just the Corporation and the students, but also all its graduates and all the ones who would be nice/impressed enough to give it a praise. Why should one abase their own school and degree? It's not a rational choice. We had probably not taught them enough: you are attached to Poly, and being hesitant or cynical towards this fact could get your degree even worse.

The other thing is that Poly students often have poor speech ability and heavy accents, and Poly is in NYC. On engineer positions speech is not a big deal, but in a competitive and business-oriented environment like Wall Street, it did create barriers for the job interviewees and could had killed their chances despite that they could have greater potentials than the ones who could get through the process by just talking like a sales person. In my opinion, it's a bit unlucky for Poly to be a New York school despite all the great incentives for being located in this great city. Poly hires a lot of its students and some awkward speakers in people-facing positions, which had, very sadly, from the educational resource investors' and non-immigrant donors' perspectives been mistakenly regarded as an indication of poor student resources and low success probability (thus low return rate for the investment). This is indeed a positive thing and shows Poly had made good attempts to place its work-study students and helping the poor and the inexperienced ones get what they need, but investors simply can't understand this and got turned away easily, and some staff members had also pissed the potential donors away by giving them a terrible experience. It's a very upsetting reality, and I do think correcting any of these except for the negative experience part could hurt Poly's ability to promote social mobility. I don't know what to suggest for Poly, but I do hope the new administration could help make a better Poly. The NYU name on our transcript could be a good thing for us, but it's good only if NYU has successfully operated and developed this institution. If it shall love none but Poly's properties and shall fail to operate Poly or even close Poly, then our transcript would simply be a shame.