<p>Say I go to a small liberal arts college and get my bachelors in computer science. I leave with a great GPA and rank. Will it matter that I went to a good liberal arts college instead of a college/university known for its computer science (such as an UC school)
Will it matter in employment for places like Google, Apple, intel, etc.?</p>
<p>Also is it worth getting a masters in computer science?
How can I ensure a job with a computer science major after college?</p>
<p>Small schools may get less recruiting visits, since companies may prefer to spend limited recruiting resources on schools with more students to recruit. The big well known companies tend to recruit more widely, since they need more recruits and have the resources to visit more schools. You also know who they are, so you can just apply to them (but then everyone applies to them). It is the smaller companies and startups that you may not know about and may only recruit locally, or with few out-of-area recruiting visits. You would have to do more of your own work to find them and apply to them.</p>
<p>The other thing to consider is how complete the CS course offerings are at the schools you are considering. While many people learn many CS topics through self education, if you are going to a college or university, you might as well go to one with courses that cover the most important CS topics so that you can learn them with the aid of instructors. Some small schools with small limited CS departments (e.g. Amherst) have cross registration agreements with schools that have larger CS departments that have more offerings (e.g. University of Massachusetts - Amherst).</p>
<p>It will matter if you only seek the big companies. Those companies go to specific schools for specific types of students. At our Cal Tech orientation, we were told that the students intern for those companies in the summer.
Google, Apple select their students from Cal Tech, Stanford, UCLA for summer internships. You can try putting in an application but there are no guarantees.</p>
<p>A CS degree is marketable whether it is from a small LAC or a large state university. The ACM defines standard undergraduate curriculum models. Even very small colleges should cover at least the ACM-specified CS core courses (including intro to programming, discrete math, algorithms, data structures, architecture/organization, programming language theory, maybe database theory and networks). Check online catalogs to make sure they do. [Curricula</a> Recommendations ? Association for Computing Machinery](<a href=“http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations]Curricula”>Curricula Recommendations)</p>
<p>Internships can be a very significant factor in developing experience and connections with employers. School location may be more important than size with respect to internship opportunities.</p>
<p>Check with the school(s) that interest you and see where recent grads have gotten hired to see if you like those options. At my oldest’s small LAC the CS grads have had no problem getting hired - often with choices and definitely with decent salaries. Whether they are going to companies you’d like to work for I can’t say.</p>