This isn’t a question. It’s a first impression of CS at Vanderbilt.
My daughter is just finishing her first semester as a CS major at Vanderbilt. We did our research before she applied, but there’s only so much you can know upfront.
I’ll post more here as she progresses through the program, but I wanted to give some early impressions for the benefit of kids who are considering Vanderbilt for CS.
My daughter got AP credit for the first CS course, so she started in CS 2201 - Data Structures. She has nothing but positive things to say about Professor Roth, who teaches most of the sections of Data Structures. I’m a programmer myself, and I’m very impressed with the course. People raised some concerns about some of the professors teaching the upper level courses. All I would say is that there are going to be some duds everywhere. It could be all duds from here on in, but it doesn’t look that way.
What I know is that Professor Roth is an amazing professor and he’s teaching a foundational course in Computer Science. That’s a very good sign. I will admit that I’m coming at things from a very practical perspective. I have no idea if Vanderbilt is a good place to study CS if you’re considering grad school. I just know that Prof Roth is on the right track for kids who are looking to go straight into industry.
On another forum a student mentioned that Prof Roth is nitpicky about comments in their code and style issues, like correct capitalization. This might seem nitpicky, but my daughter learned that lesson pretty quickly when she lost points for those things. Nitpicky? Yes. Lesson learned? Yes. I tried to teach her those lessons all throughout high school, with no success. Prof Roth got it done in one week. He won a teaching award recently, by the way.
I’ll update this thread as she goes through the program, but so far my impression of CS at Vanderbilt is very positive. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.
I haven’t been on CC in quite some time, so thank you for sharing your insight. My DS20 was accepted EDII and deferred for a year (a couple weeks before Covid hit - go figure!), so he will start in the fall as a CS major. I’ll be interested to hear more of your impressions as your daughter progresses through the program!
Same, here, any updates on the CS progress? Thank you.
P.S “nitpicky about comments in their code and style issues, like correct capitalization” - I have been in software for over 30 years and I am super glad that the prof. pays attention - code readability and standards are not nitpicky in my informed opinion. the sooner kids learn this, the better!
This isn’t meant to be any criticism of Vanderbilt’s CS program, but only for the benefits of prospective CS students considering this program. If you’re really serious about CS or any of its specialties, Vanderbilt’s program is far from ideal. Its CS curriculum is very light and course offerings are poor for a school of Vanderbilt’s reputation.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean anything because nearly every school says they’re doing the same thing. There just aren’t enough qualified and interested people for these positions at the moment to satisfy the demand.
I have no personal knowledge about any school’s hiring initiatives. I do have family that is a CS professor- recent grad who went though hiring and landed multiple offers and ended up at a very prestigious school. I agree, there is high demand.
But those are six live job openings this year in engineering and cs. With 20 allocated total. I am sure Vanderbilt is quite aware of the competition, and is willing to throw money and resources at prospects. And, being part of an up and coming CS program and a high end school in a very livable city - Vanderbilt is attractive.
Who knows, but blowing it off as completely irrelevant is over-simplistic. Whether they will hire fast enough to make a difference to a current applicant is a different question.
Harvard wanted to massively expand its CS department many years ago and it still does, pressingly. It wasn’s able to be anywhere close to its goal with its deeper pocket and greater overall prestige. There’s just such an imbalance between supply and demand, especially with competition for talents from the industry.
@1NJParent, could you please provide more detail about what you think is lacking in Vanderbilt’s CS program. I’m a parent, and I’m very happy with the course selection. It was one of the criteria we used when I was helping my daughter pick a school.
The department offers project courses in several areas of CS. These courses allow the students to go deeper into a subject after taking an introductory course. I haven’t seen that at many schools.
Another thing I would add is that you shouldn’t put too much weight on a course catalog. Many schools advertise courses by putting them in their course catalog, but never actually offer them. The best way to see what a school is actually teaching is by looking up their course schedule online. And lots of times there are great special topics courses that don’t show up in their course catalog.
The last thing I’d add is that my daughter has had great teachers in the CS department at Vanderbilt. I’ve seen people talk a lot on here about facilities and research opportunities, and all kinds of other things, but what I was most concerned about was whether my daughter was going to get a good undergraduate education in CS, and so far it’s working out great.
CS is a very broad field. The basics are almost always covered by any CS department, so that isn’t what distinguishes one program from another. If a student is happy with these basics, many schools would be more than adequate. If, on the other hand, s/he intends to go into some more specialized (and frankly, more exciting) areas of CS, then the choice of schools become more important.
You’re right that a course in a school’s catalog doesn’t always mean it’s offered every term. However, if the course isn’t even in the catalog, you can be sure it won’t be offered.
As a higher-level CS student at Vandy, I wanted to clear up a few misconceptions and offer some points for why you’d want to go here (purely reasons w/CS):
There aren’t just 5 CS courses. There’s 8 marked as CS just on the suggested schedule above, as well as up to 7 more with Tech Electives, CS Depth, CS Project, and Open Electives.
There are plenty of interesting course offerings in CS, and you actually won’t see a lot of them on the catalog. In addition to what’s in the catalog (classes like Networks, Databases, Cloud Computing, etc.), we have “Special Topics” classes (CS 3891/3892), which are one-off or not-every-semester, where the professor teaches something they’re interested in. I’ll be taking mostly Special Topics classes until I graduate. These include topics like Reinforcement Learning, Natural Language Processing, Reverse Engineering, Virtual Reality, Cyber-Physical Systems (IoT stuff), Data Viz, Robotics Algos, Autonomous Vehicles, etc. These are constantly evolving every semester, and offer some good variety.
Since CS is in the engineering school, you can also take EECE (electrical & computer engineering) classes for a lot of CS requirements, which have some good offerings: EE Networks, Embedded Systems, Image Processing, Computer Vision, Mechatronics, etc.
Vandy placement is really good for CS. I’ve interned at Verizon and Amazon so far, and I know people with offers at almost every major tech company. Check out the placement PDFs – whatever problems there may be with CS here (below), it sure doesn’t seem to affect where students end up.
You can transfer in as many AP credits as you want into the Engineering school, which is a massive plus.
If you transfer in enough credits, you can do the Accelerated Masters program, where you can get a Bachelor’s + Master’s degree in CS in around 4 years. Super big benefit that you won’t see at any other school of this caliber, because you can’t transfer in credits at most other top schools.
As for cons, I will say that sometimes it’s a little hard to get into CS classes (although I do actually think this is getting better). There also isn’t the same CS “culture” as other very CS-heavy schools. You can still find it in the right friend groups, and a lot of people do CS, but the culture isn’t as pervasive and ever-present. Now, this is a good thing in some ways (I certainly feel like it is more often than not), but if that’s something you really really value, I’d visit and talk to current students and feel it out. There is still a good hackathon here (VandyHacks) and a robotics team, as well as some nonprofit groups and the like, in terms of CS orgs.
