I was just wondering how good CS at Brown U is? I’ve heard its good for research but I wanted some more information because its not in the top 25 ish on the rankings page for CS.
What list are you looking at? Provide a link.
Brown has one of the best undergraduate CS programs in the country. A small gem. Its graduates are at all the top tech firms – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., etc. If you major in CS at Brown, you are assured a good job.
Read about Andries van Dam in Wikipedia.
And a recent article: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2015/09/30/brown-grads-flock-to-top-companies/
And Randy Pausch, class of 1982.
My dd was a math-cs major and she went on to grad school, though most of the student will go directly to employment and have excellent job placement. Brown is a smaller school and smaller department that is not going to register on undergrad rankings. I think my dd’s graduating class was 45 students, but it is up to around 70 to 80 I think.However the dept has surprising depth and breadth and there are grad school offerings you can explore as needed when you are in upper division. Additionally to CS they have interdepartmental majors such as math-cs, applied math-cs, econ-cs, computational bio. Students work very closely with profs on research if they are interested, and there are research institutes on campus that you have access to. My dd happens to have taken a job at a startup founded by a Brown research group members.
My D is also in the CS department at Brown and has loved it. It is a smaller department than most and you’ll find more of an emphasis on undergraduates than at other schools where the grad students get top billing–Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Illinois. That’s got to affect how it’s ranked in the field by outsiders. But for an undergrad, it’s top flight. My D was interested in programming and was steered to Brown by an advisor who thought she would thrive more at Brown over a larger school. But it’s not like she didn’t have the chops to survive at other places; she was lauded as one of the top coders at a competitive summer program at MIT. It was a great choice for my D, and she was very quickly able to latch on as an undergrad TA as a sophomore. Andy van Dam has a great reputation in the field and has many acolytes in business and academia. (van Dam is coy about it, but it is often cited that the character named Andy in Toy Story was a tribute to van Dam.) Because of this association, Brown is probably better known for the more creative specialties of computer science, such as animation, user experience, graphics and design, but that’s not to say that you don’t receive excellent training in hard programming skills. Brown grads also are valued for their management/people skills and, let’s face, it’s hard to find people with both excellent training as programmers and with the ability to work on or lead a team. You’ll see all the major employers on campus interviewing–Google, Microsoft, facebook, et al.–and you actually may have a better shot at a job because the competition is little less fierce than it might be than at a place like Berkeley, where your competition may number in the hundreds for a single position.
@spayurpets What summer coding program did your D attend at MIT?