Choosing an undergrad CS program because of the research interests of professors, or the quantity of research papers published, is a horrible way to go about it. The teaching environment, e.g., size of classes, and the types of classes offered is what you need to be looking at in an undergrad CS program. Don’t assume that quantity of research correlates with quality of teaching. It’s only when you want to go to graduate school that the research opportunities of a school, and research interests of professors, become important.
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okay but like tbh the teaching envrionment doesnt matter as much as research opportunities. Millions of people get a degree in CS. Its the stuff you do oustide of the curriculum that matters and how you apply what you learnt(like both cornell and rice have good learning)
Bachelor's degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2017-18 says that 79,598 people in the US graduate with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information sciences in 2017-2018.
This probably includes some less technical majors listed under the broad category, as shown at CIP user site . If so, that means that the actual number of computer science graduates per year is smaller than the numbers given, even though the numbers given are far lower than “millions” per year in the US.
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ok what i meant was that thousands of people get CS degree and the stuff you do outside like research and projects matter more
Do you think everyone who gets a CS degree and doesn’t do research are indistinguishable from one another?
um well thats how nobel prizes and turing awards are given so yea its p important. if ur gonna say that employers dont care abt theoretical cs, then well thats just wrong cuz employers like IBM and Intel would want research analysts not just people who can write software. FAANG companies want to be 1st in whatever they do, and if you do research you can be doing groundbreaking stuff
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Hi. I worked in a research department for a billion+ dollar company, FAANG level. This is not an honest/accurate reflection of the reality of CS, even at the upper echelons.
The vast majority of CS hires are software engineers or similar. We’re talking in the ballpark of 95%. Teaching and professional experience are far more important than doing research, though research is also a positive when hiring SWE’s, just not the only route.
Yes, some companies have a non-zero research presence, but rest assured these hires are not done by your average recruiters. Rice has plenty of quality CS research. Cornell has way more, but if the question is should a student pick one of those over the other because they personally are more likely to get involved in research, that is misguided as shown by the numbers and per-capita. Unless you know your specific subfield of CS and that Rice lacks it, research will not matter here.
You’re not wrong that projects and research distinguish in hiring, but there are plenty of ways do to well in industry and academia coming out of both schools. The past 150 posts have been quite a lot of meaningless back and forth to split hairs on two quality schools. Rice has less research, but it’s CS teaching is solid and grads end up in great places without trouble. I said it in post #2 but I’ll say it again I guess:
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I have been out of the loop on academic CS for about 25 years, but your comment confirms my impression of the two universities, and I would summarize it as follows:
cornell is better than rice
Cornell is harder than Rice. Cornell is more work than Rice. Cornell is colder than Rice.
Having done Cornell CS (and having had a friend do Rice CS), I can’t say with a forgone conclusion that Cornell is BETTER than Rice … (at least for undergrad).
- % of Students doing research was small
- CS Classes were excellent (even the classes I didn’t enjoy like Scientific Computing, turned out to be VERY useful in my work)
- Non-CS Classes were hit and miss … my Stats Prof was useless … some OR courses I took were marginal as well.
My friend had tremendous time at Rice and never felt disadvantaged there.
Overall I loved my Cornell experience, but sometimes, in the middle of the winter, I really wished I was at Rice …
These schools are so different in terms of vibe and location, that I hope OP has been able to make the decision to attend the school where they will fit the best, across the many factors under consideration. It is not possible to say that one of these colleges is ‘better’ than the other for every admitted student.
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Better for what? The point that many people have been trying to make is that the original poster should pick a school where they are going to thrive. A strong performance at Rice with recommendations from professors is going to look better to a grad school than a weak performance at Cornell. For a job in industry, the school is even less relevant. I have interviewed many people for software engineering positions, and their response to technical questions carries much more weight than anything I see on their resume.
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There really is no way someone can know something like that unless they’ve attended both schools.
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And am curious where someone who just joined CC a few weeks ago is getting their information on all these programs.
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My impression is this is a student with no industry experience.
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“Cornell is harder than Rice. Cornell is more work than Rice”
Sure, but that’s why it has a better reputation than Rice in silicon valley, which is where the OP said they would like to work. All the top universities represented in SV are places where you work hard and work a lot - MIT, Stanford, CMU, Cal Tech, Berkeley, even SJSU CS is not easy. Those are not fluff schools, which is kind of what you’re making Rice out to be.
Rice is not a “fluff” school, though I don’t know how its CS department ranks. I do have direct experience with hiring practices in Silicon Valley, including Google, which is probably the most relevant. Your university and GPA may get you a phone screen. Beyond that, it will be no help at all. In fact, not only was I told to give the interview much greater weight than the resume, interviewers are often too busy to give the resume more than a cursory glance.
For all that, it’s certainly true that elite schools are overrepresented among candidates who received their CS degree in the US which is only some candidates. Besides really big name tech companies, academic background varies wildly, and often consists of a bachelors degree in any tech field abroad, followed by a masters degree in CS in the US, not always at a very well known university. There are still plenty of job opportunities in tech, and a CS degree from Rice is not going to exclude you. What you do in the first few years of employment will determine much more about your future.
Finally, there may be some confusion of cause and effect, because a Stanford education is probably going to prepare you better for a hard technical interview than a random university with non-selective admission (which does not describe Rice!). A very motivated person can teach themselves a lot of CS, not just programming, but enough of Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein to be able to handle data structure questions. There are also online resources. (This is not a vacuous observation; I am pretty sure very few people could teach themselves physics to the same extent.)
Exactly where you got your degree is not that important, provided it meets some standards that Rice clearly exceeds. So you just have to pick the best fit for yourself.
I don’t think that’s true, most CS grads are from universities that are not considered elite, take SJSU or ASU, Cal Poly-SLO, for example. These colleges do well because outside of being local, or in-state, their grads, once hired, do well in the company, not only technically but fit as well. So the company hires more from that college. This is especially true of smaller companies that don’t have the budget recruit outside of their local area or state.
I agree with that, but I mean overrepresented in the sense that you would see more Stanford graduates (especially Stanford because it has both prestige and locality) than you might expect to randomly. True, most employees will clearly not be from the top schools because there are fewer of them.
This also depends a great deal on the company. I’ll use Google as a proxy since I know it. I don’t know what it’s like now, but they used to ask for grades and transcripts, even from people with years of experience after college. They favor elite schools. But a lot of Silicon Valley companies offer gainful employment and exciting work, and have to compete in an environment in which larger companies have sucked all the oxygen out of the room. They may hire people with bootcamp or certificate backgrounds (and again I know this from experience as well). There is not one kind of job here.
BTW, I think things have changed in the past 20 years. During the first dot-com boom it was a lot more “Wild West” and you could get a job just by demonstrating competence to the right people. I miss that environment. It was more fun. There are definitely a lot more careerists now.
That said, Rice is not going to look bad for anyone. It all depends on what you accomplish there, which is still why I would go with the point: pick the school where you believe you will thrive.
This appears to be a long outdated impression, since they do not ask for grades or transcripts now, and recruit at dozens or hundreds of colleges these days, not just “elite” ones (and they apparently are willing to hire the self-educated). They seem to rely more on an interview process that consists of CS problems to decide which applicants out of the larger initial pool they want to hire. However, their current hiring process does have some important differences compared to most other employers, so it may not be accurate to use them as a proxy in all respects.
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