CS at Northeastern???

Colleges and Universities A-Z Northeastern University
1

I wanted to know more specifics about CS at NEU mainly about the student body rather than the program itself.

  • Are people working on extracurricular (or curricular projects)?
  • Is the course load light enough to work on private projects?
  • How many hours per week would you say you spend on CS work alone?
  • Is most CS work project based?
  • Are the people there dreamers, are they problem solvers or just smart, competitive, snobby?
  • How competitive is it in general (Do people work to meet their own goals or do try to outdo each other)?
  • What do the work areas look like, How are the facilities?
  • How much personal critique does the professor/TA give?
  • How much help do the professors/TAs offer?
  • How much do they aid in helping you find jobs?

Answer as much or as little as you desire.

2

My daughter was not a CS major although she took Fundies 1 - she has a bunch of CS major friends.

The classes are not easy and will keep you busy - much of the homework/projects are done in pairs or groups. The lab facilities in WVH are very nice (new) and there are TA’s there all the time to help. The TA’s vary in skill/helpfulness - several of her friends were TA’s for Fundies 1 and 2. I don’t think it is competitive - due to the group work I think it is more cooperative among the CS majors. There are co-op advisors to help you find co-ops (like every other major) and they have the number 1 rated career services in the country. A few of her friends (graduating in 2017) already have port graduation offers from their 3rd co-op company. The professors (like the TA’s) vary - some are better than others. Her CS friends are very smart, down to earth, gamers, easy going people who want to get good solid jobs when they graduate. The have co-oped at some of the best companies - hubspot, intel, and many startups.

3

I was a TA for the fundies class, as well as a CS minor. I agree that people are pretty down to earth and much more collaborative than competitive.

The difficulty of courses can vary a lot from course to course, who the professor is, and what your own strengths and weaknesses are. The same goes for courseload. Overall, expect to be challenged but not overwhelmed, as long as you stay on top of your work. (i.e., when you have a major programming homework for the week, don’t wait until the night before to start it.) Most of my courses emphasized homework projects much more than tests, but this can vary by course (expect less of this from more theory-related courses). My last two CS courses (robotics and artificial intelligence) actually had no exams and were entirely graded on weekly homework, a few online quizzes, and a final project. I know a lot of people who work on side projects, and there are great people in the NU Hacks group, which meets weekly to code on their own project together.

From my experience, professors are always very responsive to requests for help or feedback, and willing to find time to meet if their office hours don’t work for you. For the introductory classes (fundies 1 and 2), there is a huge team of tutors and TAs to help with the course, so getting help shouldn’t be a problem at this stage, if you take advantage of it. (Bonus tip: come to office hours sometime besides the day before the homework is due and you might have a TA all to yourself to help you out.)

The facilities are really nice - the whole department is located in West Village H, which is one of the newer buildings on campus. The computer lab is plenty big, with Linux and Windows computers, and it’s accessible only to CS students, so it doesn’t get as crowded as the library computers. There are also nice sunny study areas in the building that I’ve used to work on group projects.

Northeastern has a big boost when it comes to the job search because of co-op - and CS is one of the better majors for co-ops. They pay well, they’re plentiful, and they’re at some top notch places. This also means that big companies know Northeastern students are well prepared for CS jobs and many recruit heavily on campus. I have friends who are recent CS graduates who now work for Google, Amazon, IBM, HubSpot, and a lot of great start ups.

4

Well, I bookmarked this to come back to later, but it looks like you guys covered it pretty well.

The only thing I could elaborate on here really is that in my experience, the good professors aren’t just good, but amazing. There are some averaging ones, but for each subdomain you can almost always find at least one professor that is doing something in the field, willing to help, and is a great resource on the subject. I was in West Villiage H for one of my upper division classes, and a professor that was not teaching the class helped me to debug a program for 2 hours at 8PM at night on a Thursday, just for the heck of it.

In addition, the teaching is very interactive and engaging, particularly in the first year and a half or so. You won’t be just sitting in a lecture - you’ll be actively discussing and solving a problem, or designing a program as a class.

@lonelymoonlight I’m a current CS student and a Fundies 1 TA, so I can answer any more specific or follow questions here :slight_smile:

5

As far as reputation goes, Northeastern CCIS’s current rankings (around 60) do not reflect the quality of the program. The ranking is a lagging indicator of quality and I think Northeastern will get to the top 40 (and possibly higher) in the rankings within the next 5-10 years.

Why? Because rankings are correlated heavily with research and Northeastern has hired a lot of top researchers.

Northeastern is increasingly competitive with the top research schools such as UCSB, NYU, and USC. Among these new hires are the systems researcher Cristo Wilson and the theorist Huy Le Nguyen. These professors publish in the top journals, where the professors at MIT, Cornell, etc. publish. By a research-centric ranking that doesn’t consider reputation (http://csrankings.org/), Northeastern ranks 18th. This is 3rd in Massachusetts after MIT and UMASS Amherst. Harvard is also near the top. MIT and UMASS have well established and highly ranked research programs.

Why does research matter to undergrads? Because undergrads can do research with these same faculty, whose recommendation will carry a lot of weight as far as getting into top graduate schools is concerned.

I haven’t gone to Northeastern (I got in 9 years ago), but I think Northeastern (along with UMASS) is one of the best places in the northeast to do computer science, after the obvious CS powerhouses Cornell, MIT, and CMU. The co-op is a unique differentiation that favors Northeastern. They are also taking undergrads with high SAT scores and GPA.

6

Northeastern also has Matthias Felleisen, who invented the HtDP curriculum, which introduces data driven software design through functional programming. This curriculum is widely used, at other co-op universities (ex. Waterloo), technical institutes (ex. WPI), large research universities (ex. UBC), liberal arts colleges (ex. Vassar, Brown) and even high schools. He also did a lot of foundational research work in programming languages.

Northeastern has a top rated research group in programming languages. By programming languages, I mean the theory, design, and implementation of programming languages (and not that the faculty know hundreds of programming languages (-: ). Their undergraduate program reflects this expertise and this emphasis is beneficial for training software engineers.

Overall, I would very strongly recommend Northeastern for those aspiring for software engineering careers.

It’s probably still not ideal for those who want a predominantly theoretical theoretical curriculum. For these students, I think a top math school like Chicago, Yale, Cornell, NYU, Georgia Tech, or Berkeley is probably better. It is also not yet a truly top tier CS school like UW-Seattle, Cornell, MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc. But it is one of the excellent computer science schools in the next tier.

7

Great posts @frontpage. I could have written them myself. I saw you touting Alabama on the other thread. I didn’t comment there because so many have convinced themselves that Alabama is great for CS, but if you compare Alabama’s CS100 to HtDP, you can see why Northeastern and schools like it are so much better.