Hey, so I’ve recently been accepted to 3 great schools (Cornell, Virginia Tech and Cal Poly SLO) and I can’t decide between them. I’m interested in engineering, specifically computer science. These are some of the pros and cons I see for each:
Virginia Tech:
-In state tuition
-strong alumni network
-highly rated for engineering
Cal Poly
-highly rated for engineering
-good location for silicon valley jobs/internships
Cornell
-ivy league (impressive for jobs)
-one of the top CS schools in the country
-impressive other departments (in case I change majors)
-expensive
Do you plan to go back to the east coast after graduation? If so, Cal Poly might make your job search a little tougher. Don’t get me wrong. I like Poly a lot. My son is a student there. The teaching is very good, the facilities for undergraduates might be unparalleled (engineering alone has more than 80 separate teaching lab facilities and they have great facilities for student projects that don’t overlap class space) and the location is phenomenal. It’s just that engineering recruiting tends to be regional. All of those programs will attract recruiters from all around the nation, but each will see regional recruiters that don’t have the budget or the need to look nationally. So, if you know you want to go back East, the number of recruiters you’ll have access to will be limited. It’s very easy to search where Poly grads get their first jobs and what salaries they make. Their CS grads do well landing jobs at Amazon, Google, Cisco, Adobe, etc. but for the most recent class, only one left the west coast and they ended up in Utah. Again, don’t get me wrong, it’s a great school. I’d offer the same advice to someone who wanted to live on the east coast. In fact my son passed up a great scholarship at RPI for just that reason.
Cornell probably is a tier higher than the rest but I think it’s hard. Ds friend from elementary school went there for Computer Science but didn’t graduate with honors at all. She was a really smart kid. It took her a while to find a permanent job after college, same with internship. The good news is after a few years at a startup she is now working for Google.