computer science major

College Search & Selection
1

<p>this is a slightly modified repost from the engineering forum, hoping to get more responses here:</p>

<p>I am absolutely certain that I want to major in computer science (or some form of it) when I go to college next year. However, I am finding it very hard to find information specific to the computer science major ("I wanna be an engineer but I dont know what type yet" prevails). Specifically, in the USNews rankings I can't find a top whatever for computer science. The closest I can find is computer engineering, would you guys consider that to be close enough?</p>

<p>Secondly, my list of colleges I intend to apply to at the moment is:
PSU
carnegie mellon
stanford
UCB
mit
boston u
cornell</p>

<p>I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions on my list/ammendments to it specifically for computer science, and another good safety college to add (I'm thinking northwestern atm). I currently live near Los Angeles and don't want to go to school anywhere in southern california if I can help it. I really like the San Fran and Boston areas. Lastly, my entire extended family lives throughout Pennsylvania, I figure that'd also be a good place for me to be (yes, I know us wussy californians can't take the cold ^^). I want to go to a fairly urban school, cornell I am applying to for other reasons.</p>

<p>TY in advanced for the help!</p>

2

<p>Have you considered Santa Clara University?</p>

3

<p>Northwestern is not really a safety for most people. Another good urban school would be Johns Hopkins.</p>

4

<p>USNews categorizes computer science under the science programs, not the engineering ones.</p>

5

<p>The University of Maryland, College Park is 12th in the US News graduate computer science rankings. It's right outside the very interesting city of Washington, DC, it's not too far from your Pennsylvania relatives, and the weather is well-suited for wussy types. It might be an interesting place to consider as a possible safety school.</p>

6

<p>Here are some things to look for:</p>

<p>1) What is the focus of the UG CS program. Are they preparing you for grad school? or are they preparing you for a job as a programmer, engineer , etc.</p>

<p>2) do professors teach the class or TA's?</p>

<p>3) are the professors good teachers, good researchers, good writers, good consultants?</p>

<p>4) are there intern opportunities with local firms?</p>

7

<p>Northeastern universities with strong computer science would also include</p>

<p>Brown
Columbia
Penn</p>

<p>Princeton, but may not be urban enough for you</p>

<p>Of course, none are safties. Safer would be NYU, but only a true safety for superstars. </p>

<p>You should know that, although Penn State is huge in itself, it is not in a big city. Lehigh is also a safer admit, strong CS, but not in a city.</p>

<p>There are no rankings I know of for undergrad CS, and if there were, they would probably be worthless. As noted above, you don't care much about how many highly cited papers, or how much grant money, the professors have. You care about undergrad teaching, range of courses, joint programs with other departments-lots of people major in "CS and..."</p>

8

<p>Holy Cross-top30 LAC- near Boston has computer science major.</p>

9

<p>thank you guys for the info</p>

<p>keep it comin if anyone else has somethin to share</p>

<p>btw, I heard from the other thread that U of washington might be good because of their proximity to Microsoft</p>

<p>any thoughts?</p>

10

<p>Some colleges offer a B.A. and B.S. in computer science. The B.S. is more "prestigious" but is much more math and computational based. B.A. is more theory. I'm not sure what the employment opportunities are like for both. EECS (electrical engineering/computer science) is one of the hardcore majors at Berkeley.</p>

11

<p>[ceoddyn] Carnegie Mellon is the best match for you. It is ranked the # 1 CS graduate program in the country according to USN&WR. I don't know about the undergrad program, but I'd be surprised if it were not ranked among the top 3 also. Besides, it is in Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) and the campus is located in a fairly urban area, though not "dowtown" (having lived there for nearly 5 years, I can tell you the surrounding neighborhoods are actually pretty nice). Just to illustrate some of CMU's impact on the CS world, it suffices to say that</p>

<p>1) Five CMU faculty and 2 alumni have won Turing Awards (the closest equivalent to a Nobel prize in CS).</p>

<p>2) Famous CS-connected alumni (mostly grad students though) include (source: Wikipedia) :</p>

<p>*Andy Bechtolsheim (M.S. 1976), co-founder of Sun Microsystems;
*Mark Canepa (B.S. 1976, M.S. 1977), Executive Vice President, Network Storage Products Group for Sun Microsystems
*Robert Dennard(Ph.D. 1958), inventor of dynamic random access memory(DRAM).
*Edward Feigenbaum (B.S. 1956, Ph.D. 1960), computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert.
*Edward H. Frank (Ph.D. 1985), Vice President R&D, Broadcom.
*Charles Geschke(Ph.D 1973), co-founder of Adobe Systems.
*James J. Gillogly (Ph.D. 1978), cryptographer who was the first to publicly solve parts 1-3 of Kryptos.
*James Gosling (M.S. 1983, Ph.D 1983), creator of the Java programming language.
*Feng-hsiung Hsu(Ph.D. 1990), co-creator of ChipTest (while at CMU), which was the predecessor of Deep Thought, which in turn evolved into Deep Blue at IBM.
*Vinod Khosla (M.S. 1978), co-founder of Sun Microsystems, venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
*Michael Montemerlo (B.S. and M.S. 1997, Ph.D. 2003), software lead for Stanley, the robotic car that completed the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.
*John Ousterhout(Ph.D 1980), inventor of the Tcl scripting language.
*David Parnas (Ph.D.), early pioneer of software engineering.
*Drew D. Perkins (1985), author of Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP).
*Jonathan I. Schwartz (did not finish) - CEO of Sun Microsystems.
*Pradeep Sindhu (Ph.D.) - co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks.
*Ivan Sutherland (1959), computer programmer and Internet pioneer.
*Avie Tevanian (M.S. 1985, Ph.D 1988), former CTO of Apple Computer.</p>