How would you guys assess the CS department at UPenn? Do major tech companies come to recruit at UPenn? Do you feel that a CS degree from UPenn would lead to future success in the tech industry, or is it just a waste of time? Are there any specializations for the department (like how UMD has cybersecurity and UW has artificial intelligence)?
Based on a sample of one who graduated this year and had multiple job opportunities, they must be doing well.
However, that person might have been really good on their own.
Penn CS is a top CS program in the nation, comparable with schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. You might thin this is presumptuous of me to say, but knowing CS students at all of these schools, there is no effective difference in student quality. Penn offers fewer hyper-upper-level specialized courses than these schools, however, due to faculty size. We are trying to hire lots of faculty, so this will hopefully change.
Major CS companies absolutely recruit at Penn. The school is high on their radar, they come to hold information sessions and give tech talks, and they constantly ask their current interns and employees from Penn how they can do a better job recruiting Penn students. For example, one company rented out the back room of Pod, a very upscale Asian fusion restaurant on campus, where they had unlimited sashimi and drinks. This was to recruit friends of former interns—I repeat, not for people who already had accepted offers, but for people who they wanted to interview.
Penn CS is especially cutting-edge in functional programming, cryptography, and robotics (go look up some names like Benjamin Pierce, Nadia Heninger, and Vijay Kumar); however, they’re strong in all fields of CS.
Source: was a Penn CS student, am now working at a major tech company
To put your question in perspective, a CS degree from most any university in the top 100 universities as ranked by US News and World Reports, taken with a challenging course load, stellar grades, and respectable intern jobs in sophomore and junior year backed up with good references will lead (for most) to future success in CS, often with 6-digit starting salaries.
So why Penn? Penn falls in the top 100 list, and arguably in the top 10-20 list in CS. Further Penn, with its academic traditions to encourage engineering students to go beyond specialized courses in their major (e.g. “sector requirements”) offers a broad range of technical, liberal arts and business course opportunities. The “One Penn” spirit that pervades course selection enables well rounded students. In practice recruiters, for whom Penn is often on the A-list, often see Penn CS graduates as potential future technical leaders and managers.
You may want to research the role that Penn has played in the evolution of CS.
CS is now the largest major in SEAS, which should tell you something. 