I am interested in hearing how the respective CS departments of these schools are like today in terms of environment, classes, and prospects. I understand that Brown has a very good CS department that sends many people to companies like Pixar, and that Cornell is regarded as the best engineering Ivy. But I do not know much about Penn. It seems that it’s just considered a good major but does Penn’s CS department, especially in undergrad, compare to the other two?
Penn has very strong and highly regarded CS and EE departments. Penn CS graduates are highly sought after by today’s leading software/hardware centric companies.
The history of the development of the modern computer is often lost in today’s emphasis on “apps” and the like. The ENIAC, the world’s first completely electronic computer was conceived and constructed at the Penn’s EE department (The Moore School of Electrical Engineering). Penn has had a strong emphasis in CS ever since.
Also at Penn, with its “One Penn” philosophy, CS undergraduates can take courses in any of the Penn colleges, including Wharton. CS combined with an element of business savvy is a strong career enhancing mix.
Brown historically has had a strong “graphics” element in its CS program. Also Brown undergraduates with the proper course preparation can take courses at RISD. Hence the Pixar connection is at least historically not a surprise.
This said, all three colleges on your list will enable you to get an exceptional CS education. More important than the course details is the fit. Socially they are about as different as three universities can be from one another. And as I’m sure you know they are very selective.
@fogcity - I’m curious how you would describe the social differences between Penn and Cornell (I think the differences between them and Brown is pretty clear to most).
@fogcity Thank you for that. I do have interest in business so that One Penn policy is really appealing considering Penn has the best business school in the world. I didn’t know that Brown was well specialized in the graphics part of CS although I probably should have suspected that from the large number of graduates that end up going to Pixar/LucasArts. Is Brown still one of the top in CS outside of graphics, though? I’m not exactly sure where I want to go with CS, so I don’t want to feel pressured into focusing on graphic design - I’m not much of an artist. But as CHD2013 asked, what is the social setting really like at Cornell and Penn? Brown has a more relaxed but still intellectual vibe to it, but is Cornell really a high stress setting?
Bump
This does not seem to be an especially unusual policy, unless Penn is claiming that there is space available for students to choose any out-of-major course that they want, including those in Wharton that are probably quite popular. Many schools do not have any restrictions on selecting out-of-major courses within one’s free electives, other than space availability in the courses, which can be an effective barrier at the department level for popular courses.
The short answer is “yes”. Brown has a very strong CS program and Brown CS graduates are heavily recruited by top firms.
You may want to review the Brown CS course catalog. In addition to core CS courses (Operating Systems, Object Oriented Programming, etc.) Brown offers courses over the full CS spectrum from “Designing, developing and evaluating User Interfaces”, “Computational Linear Algebra”, “Cyber Security and International Relations”, etc. etc. – an impressive curriculum.
Penn and Cornell CS graduates are also heavily recruited so that from the perspective of the CS curriculum all three colleges will prepare you extremely well for a career in CS and related fields.
Cornell grads are highly recruited by both IT and IB firms. In terms of alumni representation, there are more Cornell alumni at Google and Goldman Sachs than any other top 10 school incl. Harvard. Penn is more known for finance (Wharton), and Brown is more known for liberal arts, as well as its liberalism (the new Berkeley).
That said, I worked with a Brown grad once(in IT), he was sharp and pretty cool to work with.
Here is the most recently available post graduate placement data for Brown CS:
http://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/careerlab/post_grad_data/concentration/COMP
All of these schools will have great placement. Pick back on other factors IMO. You could make an argument that any of these are the best.
I will say this: my school works closely with Brown’s curriculum and their opening sequence is taught and designed very well. I highly recommend it, though I don’t have anything from Penn / Cornell to compare it to.
Thank you for all the info @fogcity @arwarw @PengsPhils
I will definitely look more into the actual social factors of these universities as well. Brown is looking more and more appealing and seems to have fantastic placement. As of now, the most appealing thing for Cornell to me is its graduate ranking but yeah, I should worry more about getting accepted first.
Brown has two CS intro sequences, 15-16 and 17-18. The 17-18 one is preferable, since it uses four different computer languages. 15-16 apparently uses just Java. Some students in 17 switch to the accelerated version 19 after a month.