<p>Brown
Carnegie Mellon
Carleton
Harvey Mudd
Northwestern
Rice
Swarthmore</p>
<p>(don’t believe Reed even offers a CS degree, Haverford’s department is quite small)</p>
<p>Add WUSTL to the above list. It definitely has a low-key, noncompetitive, collaborative vibe. It was the selling point for my son after visiting other campuses and I have heard from others attending that they found the atmosphere to be much more help-each-other than at some of the other elite universities.</p>
<p>I have to point you right at Brown University. My daughter has mentioned the collaborative culture at Brown as one of the major points she loves about the school. While she has a competitive nature, was in several varsity sports and had a mini math competition with another top student in HS, she prefers the opportunity to collaborate across disciplines and within the department. She has also taken many classes in other depts, mostly science. She feels like most everyone there is trying to help you achieve your goals, not just profs, but fellow students, and she has brought other students in on nice projects she has landed. Not that she hasn’t had certain frustrations in this area, but to me, that is just good experience.</p>
<p>But don’t doubt that students there are very focused multi-taskers. One difference she has with you is that she did not intend comp sci, but ‘found it’ at Brown and just started on most of the major classes Jr year. She had enough science and math so that was possible. She was a freshman advisor to CS majors last year (associated with the same group of students as their faculty advisor) and one thing she had to do was to encourage the first years to diversify a bit.</p>
<p>I have found her attitude about grades a bit cavalier for my taste, as it seems the students are not much grade focused, yet it is very hard to get an A in a class. While her attitude about getting what she wants out of a class, and self studying to get into a class that she does not have prereqs for is intense.</p>
<p>Oh yes, she is CS/Math major and is extremely happy with the department. But she is slanted more to the theorical and mathy side of things.</p>
<p>CMU is, of course, a great school for your interest.</p>
<p>I guess I should add that she finds that if you have a goal and go to speak to a professor, you can get into most any class you like. She took a Sr. Honors Thesis class (without the thesis req) in sophmore year cause she was interested in the project the prof was working on. She has taken several classes that profs allowed her into without prereq’s (so she had to do a lot of extra self prep), and she has been in a CS/math theory class with 3 undergrads and only 1 grad student in total, taught by the prof who wrote the book that everyone uses. She expects to take mostly grad level classes Sr final semester. </p>
<p>Research opportunites are extremely available. Spring Jr year, she did an independent research study (required for this major) with a prof who had a summer project she was interested in. She got to audit the prof’s grad level theory class and got a research grant for summer research on that project. She continues this work this fall.</p>