Computer Science Major???

[phantasmagoric]

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JHU is most famous for its medical school but it is an excellent all-around university with a balance of strengths in humanities, sciences, and engineering. It spends more money on research per year than any other school in the country, but has fewer than 5K undergraduates. Some interesting research has been done there in Natural Language Processing (the late Frederick Jelinek taught at JHU, see Frederick Jelinek’s home page) and there must be some synergy between CS and all the medical research as well.

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<p>Seconded! JHU is an excellent school for CS, despite its comparatively low ranking. I’ll add that in the field of natural language processing, JHU is one of maybe three universities who could legitimately claim the top spot (the other two being CMU and Stanford), but if I had to say one, it’d be JHU. An unlikely contender but no doubt a school to be reckoned with in NLP :)</p>

<p>(If you’re interested in NLP: there are several professors there who studied under the renowned Mitch Marcus, at UPenn, and JHU’s professors have also produced a great many of the top people in the field now.)</p>

<p>edit: I’m a senior at Stanford, not JHU (so not affiliated), but was considering the latter for my PhD. Not going there but it was easily my favorite of my safer options, and I would’ve chosen it over much more selective schools (including CMU… though of course that’s not unreasonable in NLP).</p>

[phantasmagoric]

<p>Also, here’s a blurb from a CS professor at JHU on the “ranking” of CS:</p>

<p>[Answers</a> for Prospective Graduate Students](<a href=“Answers for Prospective Graduate Students”>Answers for Prospective Graduate Students)</p>

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By contrast, the overall department ranking is not especially relevant. In particular, note that departmental rankings are highly correlated with size. Smaller departments (like JHU CS) can be made up mostly of well-known and productive faculty, so they score well on per capita measures. The trouble is that most rankings are based largely on surveys of reputation, which reward large departments — a smaller department has to focus on a smaller number of research areas, so most survey respondents will not work in any of these areas and so will not be familiar with the department.

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