My D and her husband and most of their friends were 1- 2 hours away and they did not come home on weekends.
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Colorado State University fits the bill. Not sure about the CS program specifically (only that they offer it), but the Denver Metro area is great for internships, the marching band is the largest organization on campus, and while there is a Greek system, itâs only really important to the small percentage of students in it, students are VERY happy and there are a bunch of direct flights on United and SouthWest daily from Baltimore.
University of Colorado would work as well, but the Greek system is larger.
University of Denver has a smaller pep band, smaller population, a larger percentage of Greek participants, and is right in Denver (I believe itâs a defined campus).
All three have happy students, are low pressure environments, and are in great college towns, yet have really different feels. If youâre doing visits, itâs easy to see all three. My guess is heâd like at least one of them. I think heâd also stand a good chance of getting into honors at all of them. The honors program at CSU is outstanding.
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Thanks for the heads up. Stopped around Duke because he doesnât want much further south⊠So yes geography is the limiter there.
Our kid is definitely into more serious path, Def not IT or just coding. Has even considered math major so I do think quality is also important
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Programming != Computer Science
The top CS schools donât teach much programming. The programming language is more a means to an end.
Kids think of CS classes in terms of Data Structures, Algorithms etc rather than Python, Java etc.
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I did it, as it can sometimes be hard keeping the CS threads straight, particularaly when thereâs not much verbiage in the title). Since the band was listed as âvery importantâ and it was a good way to distinguish your familyâs situation from others, I thought it would work. Itâs also why I didnât suggest WesleyanâŠbecause I couldnât find a marching/pep band for it.
Would you like east coast added to the title?
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Iâm good - I actually think I have enough good feedback.
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So true! And so well put!
I wish this could be pinned somewhere. Every time someone says the school doesnât matter for CS, that you can learn programming anywhere, they should be pointed to this.
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Not an expert in CS schools - but I guess Iâd ask - why is it (implied from above) that the top schools teach different things than the other schools?
Wouldnât curriculums - to some extent - at least the content or direction - be similar across the board?
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Rutgers NB CDS section F1 says that 68% of frosh live in campus housing.
UMDCP CDS section F1 says that 88% of frosh live in campus housing.
So, while both have some apparent commuters (more for Rutgers), most students at both appear to be residential. However, there is a subset of residential students commonly called âsuitcaseâ students who stay on or near campus during school days but leave to their family homes on most weekends.
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Most colleges with reasonable CS departments and majors have upper level CS courses with at least nominally similar topical coverage, although smaller CS departments (e.g. at some LACs) may be missing some common upper level courses or offer them very infrequently. Depth into the content may vary, but it is often not too obvious just from the course descriptions (although if the course syllabus and assignments are available, someone familiar with the field can assess that).
The organization of lower level CS courses seems to vary all over the place. It does seem to be the case that, at less selective colleges and community colleges (that are the starting point for students on the transfer pathway), there are more credits worth of beginner courses devoted to beginning programming skills as a prerequisite for the courses emphasizing more foundational concepts, while at more selective colleges, students jump right into the latter where the needed programming skills are to be learned concurrently.
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Iâve seen them as well as cheerleaders, especially at Homecoming games against Amherst and Williams. Pick-up bands in general are pretty easy to organize at Wesleyan University.
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Great question @tsbna44. This likely warrants its own thread since the assumption that âitâs all the sameâ comes up often on these forums. But Iâll respond briefly, adding to what @ucbalumnus said, as the answer may be useful to OP as well.
CS programs vary in:
- breadth (range of courses available, especially in less common/popular areas)
- depth (how rigorous courses are)
- style (from math/theory heavy to application focused)
- opportunities (for research, funding, collaboration with other departments and schools, co-ops/industry engagement, etc)
- outcomes (some schools are recruiting targets for certain firms, have a location advantage, or have better graduate program outcomes).
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For example an authoritative source at UWMadison told me that they run a game development course only once every 2 years, and the capacity is only about 150 kids. The program graduates around a 1000 kids a year. So I would chalk this up to lack of breadth even though Madison is considered a well regarded program. Now I may not care about a game development course, but I may care about a course on compilers or ML/AI and they will all have capacity constraints.
Whenever I asked folks at Madison whether any course on their curriculum is available before the kid graduates, they could only say that your graduation will not be delayed for want of the requisite number of lower and upper level courses. Not that particular courses that I am interested in would be available to me, even if they were offered.
On the question of depth/rigor, the requirements are vastly different across colleges.
Even within the main Data Structures course at Princeton (taken first semester by 60% of the students majoring in CS), some 4 precepts are taught by grad students and the main instructor, and one precept is taught by Tarjan (Turing medal winning prof) â catering to kids with different needs. Kids that were in Trajanâs precept took the algorithm analysis course by hm in the second semester â this is a 400 level course normally taken in the senior year. If you did well in that you could take his grad seminar in the 3rd semester. It is hard to get this kind of flexibility in an average CS program.
In the first systems course at Princeton taken in the second semester, two person teams code an entire bash shell from scratch. Takes 40 hours per kid. I havenât seen this yet at Rutgersâ maybe itâll come up later.
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And some schools allow undergrads to take grad level courses to expand offerings even further.
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So if you were to rank our list of schools (all of which fit the general college requirements like geography and band), how would you rank them based on this âqualityâ factor of CS program alone - taking into consideration the different qualities of top programs. Is it essentially aligned with USN rankings or would you rank differently? Iâm just curious now.
Rather than rank, I prefer to place schools into tiers. Within a tier, personal preferences come into play based on what youâre looking for, and that determines your personal ranking.
I will PM you later in the day to share my thoughts. If I do it publicly here itâs bound to generate debate, which is against forum rules.
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Thanks, Iâm genuinely interested in these tiers.
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Just want to stress that area of interest is really important when trying to personalize a list and create a student ranking. I know itâs been mentioned up thread a few times but doing a deep dive into the course offerings for tech electives, including frequency of when they are offered, course sequencing, and pre-reqs is important. We found a lot of variability in sequencing when looking at curriculums.
Iâd also look at the possibility for your student to âcreateâ their own classes through professor collaboration or research. Some honors programs allow for those kinds of customized experiences in the later years and they can count as upper level tech electives.
From our experience, some schools are very transparent about their offerings and requirements, but others less so. Your student may need to reach out to some departments to get that level of detail.
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Please keep fighting the good fight here on CC!
I went to Carnegie Mellon and worked in non-tech positions at networking/hardware engineering/software engineering companies for over a decade.
Because I wasnât a CS major and didnât work in a technical position, I donât feel qualified to refute the âgo anywhere because itâs employableâ campaign, but I can tell people with certainty that the CS majors at the companies where I worked most certainly did not come from anywhere and everywhere. They came primarily from a handful of marquee CS schools, mostly the ones that people on CC always say arenât worth the money.
It wasnât until @coolguy40 posted that I ever even considered that people might be talking about different kinds of career paths. I donât know anyone from CMU who went into âcorporate IT jobs.â Maybe the go anywhere philosophy works for certain career paths, but for others there are seem to be preferred schools for early career opportunities, and itâs harder to get the higher level ones if you canât get into the entry level ones.
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