@me29034 Thanks for your suggestion and it makes sence
@TomSrOfBoston Thank you so much for arranging them
@GREmergency for the links. Really appreciate it.
Also consider the LACs like Williams and Swarthmore, they also have strong Comp Sci departments with impressive faculty and access to professors. Being well rounded with classes in the humanities will help you stand out from the comp sci masses.
My friendâs son just graduated UMD with a CS degree. Heâs going back to get his masterâs, but had a great internship in CA while doing undergrad. His little brother is a sophomore there now. Great for CS.
For future people with the same questionâŠas someone who has worked at small colleges and state schools and whose kid went to CMU for CS I have two thoughts.
- Best program you can do for a little debt. Meaning where for many majors I say go cheap, for this I say go a little better than cheap. Maybe $40,000 total debt or less?
Why?
Because: - It depends what kind of CS your want to do. If you want to do IT for a company back home or basic programming then any school will do and you just pick the size campus you like based on how fast you learn, how much help you will need and personality.
But if you want to work in virtual reality, AI, deep cyber security or other really cool things then you need to pay a little more and go to a program where you can land good internships and do research and where they have the $ to have the gadgets.
My daughter did an internship at Google after first year, did research and got published after second year and did internship at Oculus after third year. That internship was usually only open to PhD students. She got two more things published and was lead author on one.
She was deciding between grad school and work and chose to work for awhile first to pay off all debt in two years and do more cool stuff. She started with big salary that is 3x what the students at the state U start at. So just go ask questions based on the type of CS you want to do. Pick the cheapest best program for you. They make enough in CS ($30k during summer internship) that they can afford a little debt.
Mind you, she was able to learn a lot on her own so she didnât care if classes were big. My other daughter would have hated that and did pre-med at small campus with lots of attention so could ace org chem etc
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Thatâs just not true for top schools. CMU, Georgia Tech, Michigan, and Illinois would have a lot lower salaries if this was true.
Also, Iâll go against the grain here. I think itâs an overgeneralization that rankings donât matter for CS majors. Sure, software engineering is a fair bit more objective of a field than stuff like banking/consulting, but for the high paying entry-level software engineering gigs (approx. $150k+ total compensation before benefits in NYC/SF, or the equivalent in a lower COL city), itâs a lot easier for people from top schools to secure them. This is especially true for the ultra high paying entry-level gigs (approx. $220k+ total compensation before benefits), where the firms (itâs mostly niche unicorns, prop shops, and hedge funds in this category) recruit almost exclusively at few schools. Of course, these ultra-high paying jobs I mentioned are few and far between, but there is enough of the high-paying entry-level jobs out there that I think it ought to be a consideration.
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Last time I saw someone paid more because of the school they went to was in the '80s. Someone might be paid more out of school because theyâre deemed to have better skills, but they wonât be paid more just because of the name of the school on the diploma.
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welcome (back) to NYC
Just to comment: yes, itâs true the school you wonât to wonât matter after three years of employment. Just like your high school grades, SAT and AP scores, etc., wonât matter three years after you are in college.
This doesnât mean your grades, SAT, etc. were useless in getting into college. And it doesnât mean your college and performance doesnât have an influence on getting an initial job out of college.
I was involved in undergrad (and grad) technology recruiting for 15 years, campus lead at a top 5 national program for 5+. We absolutely had a list of ânational schoolsâ, with dedicated recruiting resources, hiring targets, and salary tiers. Local offices could hire from other local schools, but in limited numbers with much higher grade/performance threshold, and very different salary tiers.
Once folks were hired, career progression was completely dependent on job performance. Your college indeed no longer mattered.
Every step in the sequence is meaningful for the next step, but unlikely beyond that.
Iâve been out of school for 20+ years, and it still matters ⊠(granted, nominally so, and I am not a dev)
There is definitely variation in rigor across CS curriculums:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2ui5z7/iswas_anyone_else_just_mediocre/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body
Look at the comment by âshadowdude777â.
His alma mater might have improved its CS curriculum by now, but looking at OS finals a few years back, I saw a pretty big difference in how challenging the questions were from a regional/directional to an average flagship (though some people here say itâs good for CS) to a public ranked in CS to an Ivy/equivalent to MIT. The last 3 were (somewhat) closer together, but definitely big gaps between the first, the second, and the others. Biggest difference between the last 3 is that the questions at the good CS public were all easily machine-gradeable (so more black and white), the Ivy-tier school had more conceptual questions, and most of the questions at MIT werenât more challenging, but the final had twice as many questions to answer as the other 2 top schools in the same amount of time (so challenging in that sense; yet more than half the class still scored an A; I donât believe it was curved, either).