An oral candidacy exam and a public thesis defense, conducted by the student's Doctoral Committee, are also required. Research Facilities Department facilities include an extensive array of PCs and workstations, which are located in the research laboratories of individual faculty members. There are more than thirty laboratories that support research. In thermal fluid and energy sciences, laboratories are available for the study of gas turbines, electronics cooling, heat transfer, laser processing, fouling research, and phase change heat transfer. In tribology, laboratories for the study of fluid systems, tribology, and boundary analysis are available.
Most support is in the form of research or teaching assistantships.
In addition, full tuition is granted. Additional compensation for summer months is often available from funded research grants and contracts. There are about 4,300 undergraduates and 1,750 graduate students representing all fifty states and more than eighty countries at Rensselaer. Location Rensselaer is situated on a scenic 260-acre hillside campus in Troy, New York, across the Hudson River from the state capital of Albany. The Capital Region has one of the largest concentrations of academic institutions in the United States.