<p>Hi guys,
I am applying as an international student to colleges in the US. I would be applying for an CS degree in the top 10 - 15 colleges.
Please give me the names of the BEST CS schools APART from the ones listed on the US news website :</p>
<p>Undergraduate</a> Engineering Specialties: Computer - Best Colleges - Education - US News</p>
<p>Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks</p>
<p>Here is an idea…</p>
<ol>
<li>List all 50 states of the USA</li>
<li>Add “University of” just before the name of the state…or</li>
<li>Add “State University” just after the name of the state</li>
</ol>
<p>That will produce a pretty long list of schools that will have decent CS programs.</p>
<p>^ Whatever . I am only applying to the top 15. So I am really looking for say, the next best 5-6. Thanks</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well…</p>
<p>If you insist and drank the “the Top-10/15 is the only path” juice AND don’t want to buy the US News edition to get an extra 5-6 schools…I would look at the top schools in computer engineering and possibly mathematics and choose 5 or 6 that are not in your initial list. More than likely, those same schools will have good CS programs.</p>
<p>Your response is kind of …
Search button is there for you. Way too many of these threads. For computer science, any top 50 will give you the right materials. If you are looking forward to working in the industry, make sure you do stuff outside classroom.
This is pretty much the bottom line for a computer science major. If you want to stay in the academia, then you will have a long way to go - PhD.</p>
<p>Ok this would be my (incomplete) list (for undergrad):
1st tier: MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell
Lower 1st tier: UIUC, U.Wash, Ga/Tech, Michigan
2nd tier public: probably your state flagship
2nd tier private: Northeastern, BU, NYU, RPI, WPI, RIT, Illinois Tech
3rd tier: state satellite, relatively unknown private</p>
<p>It honestly doesn’t matter too much where you go. I personally wouldn’t drink the prestige kool-aid if I were you. Go to a school that you like and that you can afford (good scholarships, etc). Any school can prepare you well enough. Take lots of math classes, some EE/CE classes, grad classes to challenge yourself if undergrad classes aren’t enough of a challenge. Get a killer GPA and impress your professors a lot so you can do research if you are thinking about grad school in CS with funding. </p>
<p>CS UG is quite overrated… Math/Physics UG->CS grad isn’t a bad path either and would prepare you to think more like a software engineer or computer scientist rather than a code monkey.</p>
<p>Study hard, try for internships and research opportunities. I got an internship out of my freshman year at WPI. If your school doesn’t have the research that you like to do, try for an REU over the summer. My school isn’t known as the “best best” computer science school but some people do end up going to work at Google/Microsoft or to attend CMU/UW/<insert top=“” cs=“” school=“” name=“”> grad school. If you don’t like your school, you can always transfer.</insert></p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>RPI is more of a peer school to Gatech, UIUC, Michigan, Etc for undergraduate technical disciplines.</p>
<p>cal poly san luis obispo</p>
<p>CS is one of those fields where it hardly matters even where you’ve done your Ph.D**, nevermind undergrad. Where you did your undergraduate program will not matter as long as its generally regarded as a decent institution. It’s not like you can get any super R&D positions being an actual computer scientist without a Ph.D or M.S. anyway unless you’ve got a B.S. and you’re getting those NSA/Microsoft-endorsed/Google-endorsed internships, doing research in CS, writing worms that destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, etc.</p>
<p>** To a reasonable extent. What I really meant by this is that for academia, it’s not as cut-throat because if you want to be a computer scientist, you’re not really restricted to academia at all, unlike certain disciplines in other fields. Company’s always hire computer scientists for R&D so jobs are plentiful.</p>
<p>I think IndianPwnerDude pretty much nailed it. One can do well out of a lower-tier school–I’ve known some folks who were quite good CS folks and came out of middle and bottom tier schools. I think the better schools do get you further along though. I’ve seen students who do really well at lower tier schools really struggle in graduate school. And I went to grad school at a place where the average student didn’t have as strong of a background as I did (and I changed majors from undergrad to grad…). </p>
<p>As far as the PhD thing goes, CS (like engineering) is a field where results trump most anything else. The best results tend to come out of the best schools, but certainly there are some very good folks elsewhere. Wright State, for example, is ranked almost at the bottom of Engineering Graduate schools but has one or two programs where it is outstanding.</p>
<p>Oh, I’d throw Rose-Hulman into the mix along with RPI and the like…</p>
<p>Lol, I love how your username is ivycollege when most of the ivies suck for comp sci</p>
<p>I believe OP is a foreigner.
So maybe IVYs and the top 10 are his dreams.</p>
<p>Don’t confuse the computer engineering rankings with computer science. While many of the schools are strong in both, they are technically separate departments at most schools, with different concentrations. US News doesn’t publish an undergrad computer science ranking, but the graduate program ranking gives an excellent indicator of programs strong at the undergrad level in a field like Computer Science, where facilities and faculty strength are important.</p>
<p>USNWR Computer Science GRADUATE program ranking:
1 Carnegie Mellon - 5.0
1 MIT - 5.0
1 Stanford - 5.0
1 Berkeley - 5.0
5 Cornell - 4.6
5 Illinois - 4.6
7 Washington - 4.5
8 Princeton - 4.4
8 Texas - 4.4
10 Georgia Tech - 4.3
11 Cal Tech - 4.2
11 Wisconsin - 4.2
13 Michigan - 4.1
14 UCLA - 4.0
14 UCSD - 4.0
14 Maryland - 4.0
17 Columbia - 3.9
17 Harvard - 3.9
17 Penn - 3.9
20 Brown - 3.7
20 Purdue - 3.7
20 Rice - 3.7
20 Massachusetts -3.7
20 UNC - 3.7
20 USC - 3.7</p>
<p>These also generally correlate to the older NRC rankings, implying the same schools have generally been able to maintain their strength.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I realize you said your list was incomplete, but some of the schools in your 1st tier and “lower 1st tier” are reversed. Also, UT-Austin would also belong on any top 10 computer science list.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people base their ‘tiers’ on the reputations of the schools in general. This is stupid because only the departments matter… furthermore, top 5 and top 10 are hardly different from each other and sometimes, in some sub-fields, better than higher ranked schools.</p>