<p>My son's GC suggested DePaul in Chicago as an innovative school in gaming. DS, who is also interested in game programming as a career, is a Comp Sci major at CMU where gaming companies (Electronic Arts, for example) are major recruiters. As much as the CS major, such companies will be interested in seeing what the student is personally creating in game design. However, there are frequent discussions in the CMU threads about whether or not you should be pretty focused on your choice of major to go there.</p>
<p>It's also interesting to check out where the students go after graduation. For example, we saw that Penn CS majors tended go work for financial companies, whereas CMU go to a lot of creative companies - here's a list from a couple of years ago hanging around in my Favorite Places:</p>
<p>Just for fun :eek: your son might want to look at the career sites of gaming companies and see what they're looking for (both interns and regular employment) in terms of experience and education. Look at EA, NVidia, Microsoft, etc. And since so many CMU students are in the industry, there are excellent networking opportunities on campus.</p>
<p>Thanks for those additional thoughts!! CBBBlinker--good to hear your exper...son now refers to Drexel as "the standardr" (to which to compare other colleges) but he does seem open to visiting/considering a variety of others.</p>
<p>I'll show son the DePaul website, Marilyn, thanks! </p>
<p>ucsd dad--"confused" doesn't even beging to cover it, lol..thanks for the added explanation!</p>
<p>Best is where CS is an interdisciplinary major, like at UCI or CMU.<br>
One could easily regard game programming as frivolous, but consider a game as a graphical model or simulation. One can thus make a 'game' out of factory automation or controlling a warehouse or modeling a financial market, etc. Visual reporting of business data can be made dynamic with different overview and detail levels. Geospatial data can be displayed superimposed onto political, climatological, or transportation maps. Games can also help devise strategies for conflict resolution and test different scenario possibilities. And so on.
So there are a number of paths gaming can lead to.</p>
<p>There are software engineering majors for sure. I have several friends in a SE program at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. It's an excellent school for most engineering disciplines - potentially something your son should look into, especially as its requirements in terms of scores and GPA tend not to be as stringent as top US schools. It doesn't have any legitimate financial aid for US students, though, so if that's an issue it probably won't work.</p>
<p>UW also has incredible co-op programs with a lot of major companies - these are an integral part of the undergraduate experience there, and are apparently very rewarding. They pay well (especially the top ones), and include an incredibly diverse array of top firms (MS, EA, Goldman Sachs, all kinds). software</a> engineering, for your perusal.</p>
<p>As for software engineering vs. computer science, software engineers do a lot more of the systems design and interface type stuff related to large software programs. If your son wants to be a game programmer, I'm not sure whether that's the best route to go - I actually think that many of the best game programmers came from pure CS backgrounds, as the algorithmic and mathematical strength necessary for good game programming is significant.</p>
<p>if you just want to be a game developer, why do you want to go to colleges to major it?
I'm curretly receiving game developer magzine(not because i'm in game developing trade, it's just I know about it), and from what I see, I know there are specialized colleges offering game development courses.
and game development is not all about programming. but if you just want to be a game programmer, any SE is good.
depend on what game you want to program. Usually you will want to learn linear algebra and physics. I'm actually quite interest in this field too ;)
But I will do a CS+math major, working on Algorithms and data structures...</p>
<p>Yes, I agree, but there are certainly dedicated software engineering programs out there, for those who really want to learn the software design, systems control and interface type of programming/design stuff.</p>
<p>The more I hear, the more I realize I know nothing about this field (or the 'style of thinking' that dovetails best with the various strands of the CS field!). So I'm copying all these posts!</p>