It would be interesting to see CMU SCS’s wins/losses breakdown, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they lost a decent number to MIT/Stanford/other HYPSM, other Ivies/equivalents, as well as kids who are in-state for IL/CA/MI/GA/TX/NC/WI/VA/MD/IN. Almost half the country.
CMU’s strengths tend to be ones that a good number of publics are strong in as well.
@mathmom wrote “I’m not surprised by CMU’s yield. My son loved CMU, but it’s also in Pittsburgh, not within spitting distance of San Francisco or Boston. I think it’s likely to remain many kid’s second choice. (Though we were all pleasantly surprised by how nice Pittsburgh is, and my son didn’t care about location at all.)”
I agree the quality of life issue does hurt CMU. I’m from Boston originally, and I was not a fan of Pittsburgh when I lived there. Maybe it’s gotten better, but I don’t know anyone who would prefer Pittsburgh to Boston or San Francisco, but like mathmom said, a lot of kids don’t care about the location.
But if your kid does care about stuff like that, I’d say it’s really necessary to go and check it out before they commit. I think it’s hard to excel when you’re miserable physically, no matter how good the education is.
So at tech companies new grads typically think of desirable, we should see that interns are primarily from top colleges like the Ivies, Stanford, CMU, and Waterloo. That type of pattern does sometimes appear, but location usually shows a greater correlation. Some examples are below. Among LinkedIn members, the persons with the word “Intern” in their job title were most likely to attend the following colleges. There is a strong correlation with location, but not as much with what programs are considered “top.”
I don’t doubt that at your example company there were a lot of interns from “top” colleges. Different companies have different hiring practices. Sometimes different hiring managers have very different hiring practices within the same company. In the survey of hundreds of hiring managers I posted earlier, college reputation as a whole was the least important factor in evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions with a focus on relevant experience instead, but the opinion was not uniform. A small portions of persons in hiring positions essentially said academics is critical and experience doesn’t matter much.
Qualcomm’s Main Campus in SD
Apple’s Campus in NYC
Apple’s Campus in Austin, TX
IBM’s Campus in NYC (Main?)
My son interned at Facebook this last summer and he is a senior right now at the University of Alabama. His roommate was a graduate from Michigan Tech. Many of his friends were from non-ivy schools (and many were internationals). I have heard that many of the employees in Silicon Valley graduated from the University of Santa Clara etc. Perhaps some of the big CS companies only hire from Ivy League or high ranking tech schools, but I know many hire from everywhere as long as the student is capable.
There are self-study guides for tech interviews. Having a good resume is also key–it’s helpful to get e.g. a professor who’s knowledgeable about current hiring trends to review a resume.
D1’s experience was generally initial short technical phone interview, followed by lengthier Skype or similar tech interview with coding on the spot, followed by site visit. Google in California flies out the top 10% of their applicant pool for site visits, and then makes offers to the top 1% of the onsite interviewees–at least, that’s what they were doing last year.
So much CS recruitment seems to be via online resources–are people finding that there is a real difference in seniors snagging jobs through on-campus visits from company representatives? D1 applied to job leads and postings that showed up on her department’s online job opportunities listings, as well as some headhunter inquiries via LinkedIn and a few blind resume submissions to firms that weren’t recruiting at her school but where she wanted to work. It was that final approach that resulted in the offer she accepted. Worth it to remind any students that they don’t have to wait for their dream company to appear on their campus.
My son almost got his first internship through a job fair at CMU. It was for a firm (forget the name) that does defense/security work on fighter jets if I remember correctly. It was 2008 and the internship got cancelled in April when the economy collapsed. So he was scrambling for something else and a friend at NVidea told him they were still hiring summer interns. The next summer he applied to Google, he was given their name by a CMU grad working there, but he still had to go through the multiple interview process described in #124. (Google may also have had him on his radar because he’d done well enough in a contest they ran the summer after his freshman year to make it to next to final round. They actually flew him to NYC from Pittsburgh for the contest.)
I’m interested that Marist College is up so high for the NY office of IBM. I think of it as a college for B+ students around here.
Well, IBM isn’t exactly at the top of the heap in desirability . . .
BTW, it’s typically smaller software shops that recruit from a limited number of schools.
“I was not a fan of Pittsburgh when I lived there. Maybe it’s gotten better” If it’s been many years since you lived in Pittsburgh, there have been many changes in the last 10 or 20 years. It usually does well in quality of life surveys and the cost of living makes it more affordable than many other major cities. It is not Boston or San Francisco but it has its own charms. But I agree, that many young kids would probably prefer living in Boston or San Francisco than Pittsburgh. They want to be where they perceive the action to be, whether that’s a particular college, city , or company.
Sometimes, merely being in an area with many companies can give the student awareness that they exist to apply to. For example, a student at SJSU or SCU may realize that there are many companies other than GAFAM that hire CS graduates, while a student at some distant school may not even realize that they exist to apply to.
Of course, the SJSU or SCU student can get to on-site interviews at Silicon Valley computer companies much more conveniently (for both the student and company) than a student at a distant school.
Do employers care whether a student gets a CS degree from the engineering school or from arts and science?
Not specifically.
Of course, if the different types of CS degree programs at the same school have different requirements, then the extent that a student’s choice of courses differs may matter.
It relates to Marist’s unique “Marist/IBM Joint Study” program that involves various collaborations between Marist students and IBM, along with IBM providing a large amount of tech resources to the college. They show some of the Marist IBM interns involved in the program at http://openflow.marist.edu/ . You can find much more info with a Google search.
I’m sure I could but since my kids are done with college, I don’t think I’ll bother! But will keep it in the back of my head if I run into someone for whom that sort of program would be appropriate.
I prefer Pittsburgh to Boston, hands down. In fact, Pittsburgh is one of my favorite cities. I understand the city went through some difficult times and I’m amazed by its ability to innovate and recover. Here are some good articles about the new Pittsburgh, in case anyone is considering attending college there:
http://time.com/money/3989171/best-big-cities-2015/
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/pittsburgh-robots-technology-103062#.VdyjmdNVhHx
@ItWorks Thanks for those links. I really enjoyed that second article.
I also want to applaud Pittsburgh. My D is getting a CE degree from Pitt and the school and the city has treated her well. She has gotten well paying internships and the cost of living is very reasonable. The city has plenty to keep her busy and it is a more relaxed atmosphere than larger cities.
My son will graduate Marist in December with his CS degree, and has friends hired at Facebook, Apple, and other great paying first jobs. He has been working at the Apple store during college to get a leg up, and has access to all job postings, even in California. If you do well and pursue it the jobs are there…
Data10. The example company that I mentioned above is in the silicon valley and they paid for travel costs (both for the onsite interviews and for relocating for the summer). I’m guessing that only about 25% of their interns this summer came from California schools. So, in that instance, location appeared to have little bearing.
I suspect that the disproportionate representation of elite top tier colleges was because they hired relatively few interns (only 20) compared to what I hear is hundreds at Google and Facebook – and yet the difficulty of their technical interviews was harder than those two companies ( according to some interns who posted on Quora).
But I agree that most tech companies will take interns from any college – once the interns have been identified to meet their standards…programming contests can be a particularly useful identifier.
I didn’t bother reading all the other posts because there were so many so I apologize if I’m repeating anything! 
My son also went into college as a CS major - he also had a very high SAT (2300) and was applying to the top schools. Because he was a white male, he received a lot of “no’s” from some of the best - CMU, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell - I could go on all day. Because the boy that you’re speaking of is looking to go into a math/science based career, and because he is a white male, he should most definitely be applying to many other schools, even if they think they’re low matches (which they’re not). It’s VERY difficult to get into any of the top schools for any major, but particularly difficult if you’re a white male going into the math/sciences. I don’t care WHAT his GPA or SAT is.
And just as an aside, my son ended up changing his major when he realized CS was not for him. So you never know.
@Data10 - I would not steer anybody to IBM under any circumstances. I have had so many friends and colleagues resource actioned (IBM speak for layoffs) over the past few years it is truly sad.