I am an engineering student. This is the third calculator that I purchased in the past year, after the TI-30 and the TI-89, both of which still work. That does not include a calculator app that I purchased which I actually use most of all. I bought this one because often professors will limit the model of calculators allowed on his/her test to the ones that can be used on the PE and FE exams, making this one allowable unlike my TI-89. I'm not going to compare this to the TI-89 because they are in different categories. This calculator is better than the TI-30 due to its capabilities of performing integrals and derivatives, but the number one reason I bought this to replace my 30 was that it could perform row reduced echelon form (rref) on small matrices. Don't know what that is? Suppose you have three equations and three unknown variables, rref can solve those variables for you. This can be useful in Statics class or for those taking algebra. For those of you taking linear algebra...I think you are going to use something more powerful because the Ti-36X Pro limits matrix size and you are likely to perform other operations that this calculator cannot handle. I'm not going to get into all the features that the 36 has that the 30 does not, but I will mention that I like that the 36 uses E for inputting scientific notation compared to the 30's x10^n. It takes up less space on the screen and looks cleaner.