<p>I want to major in Comp Sci and I was thinking about applying ED to Cornell. Would an ivy diploma look better when applying to jobs than a degree from my state school? What about big company's like Google or Apple?</p>
<p>Thank you =)</p>
<p>edit: I want to get a phd before getting a job</p>
<p>Of course it would look better. It’s an IVY school after all</p>
<p>In CS, it’s all about your SKILLS and experience.</p>
<p>If you were hiring people would you hire a bad programmer from Cornell or a good programmer from a state school? A big name might get you in the door for an interview easier, but probably won’t get you the job.</p>
<p>Why do you want a PhD before getting a job in the industry?</p>
<p>What most people miss when debating top school or not is that there are two totally different worlds you can pursue.</p>
<p>In World 1, you go to college for CS. After graduation you make $60k per year as a programmer, gradually working your way up by being a good programmer and making friends. After 10 years you’ve moved into a 6-figure salary and maybe even a middle management position.</p>
<p>In World 2, you go to college for CS. After graduation you make six figures working for a management consulting firm, investment bank, or venture capitalist. For a few years you monitor the emerging trends and new start ups then jump over to an internet start-up with much promise as senior management. By 30 you’ve probably banked your first million dollar year.</p>
<p>In World 1, virtually any college will do. Better colleges will open more doors to places like Google and Microsoft, but at the end of the day, you’ll find something at most respectable colleges as long as you keep your GPA above 3.0. In World 2, it’s all about building brand and making contacts. This world is really only open to you if you go to a top school.</p>
<p>Most people on here seem to miss that difference. They work from their personal experience and basically ask themselves “Would Cornell get me more money as an entry level programmer?” while ignoring the entirely new world to which a top school opens doors.</p>
<p>Piggybacking on the “World 1” vs. “World 2” concept…</p>
<p>In World 1, one has to be ready for constant competition all the time. It may not be quite like breaking into the high-finance field, but it will be close. You have to have the grades, the extra-curricular activities, the connections/networking and the school. One or two bad grades in courses can hurt you. One small stumble on a project can impact your career. For those who want to think/eat/sleep “career”, then these folks are the ones suited for World 1 (with the right school).</p>
<p>As for World 2, just about most state schools will be OK. I am someone who is clearly into World 2 as it took like 8 years to get to 6-figures. At the same time, with the right skill-set, you are not really competing hard for jobs. If you end up obtaining something like a high-level security clearance and working in the INTEL/defense sector, no you will not get management consulting money but you will get more than non-cleared private sector jobs and rarely work over 40 hours. Remember, the USA will always have enemies so the INTEL/defense work is not going away.</p>
<p>If you are someone who views career as just “a time slice out of one’s day”, then World 2 is better suited for you.</p>
<p>There is NO doubt that a top-10 school and all the other attributes open doors. I personally believe one has to weigh the risk/rewards of each “world”.</p>
<p>*<em>Edit *</em></p>
<p>Piggybacking on the “World 1” vs. “World 2” concept…</p>
<p>In World 2, one has to be ready for constant competition all the time. It may not be quite like breaking into the high-finance field, but it will be close. You have to have the grades, the extra-curricular activities, the connections/networking and the school. One or two bad grades in courses can hurt you. One small stumble on a project can impact your career. For those who want to think/eat/sleep “career”, then these folks are the ones suited for World 2 (with the right school).</p>
<p>As for World 1, just about most state schools will be OK. I am someone who is clearly into World 1 as it took like 8 years to get to 6-figures. At the same time, with the right skill-set, you are not really competing hard for jobs. If you end up obtaining something like a high-level security clearance and working in the INTEL/defense sector, no you will not get management consulting money but you will get more than non-cleared private sector jobs and rarely work over 40 hours. Remember, the USA will always have enemies so the INTEL/defense work is not going away.</p>
<p>If you are someone who views career as just “a time slice out of one’s day”, then World 1 is better suited for you.</p>
<p>There is NO doubt that a top-10 school and all the other attributes open doors. I personally believe one has to weigh the risk/rewards of each “world”.</p>
<p>You’ve obviously not been involved in “World 1”. It’s not any more career oriented or difficult than other careers. The biggest difference is that you have to be able to get your foot in the door (the problem for 99% of people) and you have to be willing to take risks.</p>
<p>Actually, I made a second post because my first post switched the “World 1” and “World 2”.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that World 2 (the whole Top-10 school route) has a higher ceiling. There are also a LOT of “ducks in a row” for that route including:</p>
<ul>
<li>Good high school</li>
<li>High GPA in high-school</li>
<li>High standardized tests</li>
<li>Being admitted to a Top-10 college</li>
<li>High GPA in a Top-10 college</li>
<li>Extra-curricular activities while earning that high GPA in a Top-10 college</li>
<li>Competition for that internship and/or first job out of college</li>
</ul>
<p>…and if you still don’t get you foot in the door (because it is not guaranteed), you are working alongside of the state-university grads who spent 1/4 of the tuition. That is a risk. It is a good reward if one beats the risk but still a risk…especially when one is of an age where they are to have social life and meet people, etc.</p>
<p>I’ll say it again, if one wants to think/eat/sleep/compete career for the majority of their day (with possible great rewards), then “World 2” is for you.</p>
<p>If one wants to “work to live” and not “live to work”, then “World 1” is better for them.</p>
<p>In your list, most points are to get into a top program. We’re assuming that a student is already in a top program and is choosing between that and a lower tier program.</p>
<p>And, again, if you have no experience in this area, you probably shouldn’t be commenting. Being in a high profile position does not mean that you live to work - it’s not about hard work at all. It’s someone working just as hard as you and as intelligent as you but making triple your salary because they went to a better school. </p>
<p>That seems unfair, and it is at a granular level. But at a high level it’s all about signalling. People like to hire Google engineers. Why? It’s not because Google is some magic company, it’s because Google’s hiring process is strict. So people who work at Google have already been screened as being highly intelligent and highly capable (on expectation). This means that having Google on your resume is a signal to other employers that you’re an intelligent and capable person.</p>
<p>Employers do the same thing with colleges. They don’t go to top schools because that’s the only place to find intelligent people, they go to top schools because those schools are difficult to get into, and getting in means that there’s something special about you. The school did the interview / screening work for them already. Well, that and it’s more impressive to a client when you introduce your Wharton graduate (again because of signalling).</p>
<p>Do some people wash out and end up in the same job as everyone else? Sure. Heck, some of them even graduate unemployed. But there’s some selective bias in taking the bottom 10% of one group and comparing it to the top half of another.</p>
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<p>A. What is your state school? Is it one that is highly regarded in CS, like Berkeley, UIUC, Texas, Michigan, etc.? Is it local to a lot of employers of CS graduates, like SJSU and UCSC (and Berkeley)? Or is it neither?</p>
<p>B. Are you interested in working in CS (whether industry or academic), or in some school-brand-conscious job like investment banking, management consulting, etc.?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No. It is all about what they teach you, and Ivies are not (in general) the renowned computer science schools. There are plenty of other schools that are on par with or better than the Ivies in computer science. Cornell is certainly really high up there in the computer science pecking order, but it isn’t going to look any better than Carnegie Mellon or Berkeley or Illinois (to name a few) in the computer science community. This isn’t the business world. Ivies are not always the biggest name brands.</p>
<p>As stated before, if you are interested in things like investment banking, the Ivy will help. Those guys are all about brand name, for better or worse.</p>
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<p>You must be new to the CS/Engineering area, otherwise you wouldn’t make such an asinine statement.</p>
<p>
But that is an important point - most people do not know the relative strength of schools in specific fields, so most people out of your field will be influenced by the general reputation of the school even if it is mediocre or outright bad in your field. As a result, if your intention is to work out of field, by going after a professional degree or into an area like sales or management, then an Ivy League degree might be the best choice for that individual. And if you want to work in your field, then the Ivy League name is pretty much useless.</p>
<p>And yet Halukcan had none of those stipulations, but rather a blanket statement.</p>
<p>@bonehead</p>
<p>Arguing that an IVY league diploma doesnt look better would be ridicilous, it opens more doors, it will land you more interviews, every company will want an IVY league grad working for them. This is the sad truth.</p>
<p>When you graduate from an IVY league school, you have more options ahead of you, if you find out that you dont like programming, you can go into finance or management consulting, but you cant do that in an average school.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that going to an average school will ruin your life, of course it wont, after all I think programming is a talent that you’re born with, it’s very hard to become a good programmer if you have no talent, where you graduate doesn’t matter if you want to work in a technical position, BUT an IVY school will open more doors as I’ve said.</p>
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<p>That does not mean that a computer company in San Jose will spend the time and money to send recruiters to Ivy League Dartmouth instead of cheaply recruiting at state and local private non-Ivy schools like San Jose State, UCSC, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Stanford. And when they do travel, they may go on day trips to Cal Poly SLO, UCLA, and USC; for longer trips, other non-Ivy schools like UIUC, Texas, Michigan, Washington, MIT, and CMU may well be higher on the priority list for recruiting visits than Dartmouth and some other Ivy League schools.</p>
<p>You’re taking a very myopic view of a career ucbalumnus. While some students graduate and seek “a programming job in a respected company”, that’s by no means the only career path. While it’s the obvious and most common choice, at a school like Dartmouth, it’s by no means the first choice. </p>
<p>Why don’t recruiters recruit Dartmouth as much as SLO? It’s the same reason many recruiters avoid MIT: the top students won’t go into standard practice. They either go to grad school or they go to high profile careers.</p>
<p>
I know, I was just trying to point out that BOTH blanket statements were at least partially true… and partially wrong.</p>
<p>
I work for a Fortune 100 company, with thousands of engineering professionals. We keep a database of new technical hires that was started about ten years ago, and to which I have access (it has no confidential information in it, and is intended as an internal networking tool). Here are the Ivy League hiring numbers:
Brown: 0
Columbia: 2
Cornell:38
Dartmouth: 0
Harvard: 1
Princeton: 2
UPenn: 1
Yale: 0</p>
<p>That is out of about 900 listings. Our hiring is dominated by technical and state schools, like OSU, UIUC, PSU, and GT, and local schools. Interestingly, Penn is quite nearby, but we don’t recruit there. Cornell we like, but Cornell is the rare engineering school with a quality engineering program.</p>
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<p>In my previous message when I said “average” I didn’t mean schools like MIT,CMU,Stanford,Berkeley</p>
<p>The schools you’ve listed there are elite and prestigious, eventhough on paper they arent IVY, they’re just as good, some are even better.</p>
<p>
We hire lots of people with graduate degrees, and still don’t take people from Ivy League schools. I think we largely avoid those graduates because (a) they ask for much more money than they are worth, (b) are not worth as much as graduates from quality engineering schools, and (c) were probably never planning on working as engineers if they chose to study engineering at a typical Ivy League school.</p>
<p>@cosmicfish</p>
<p>What are some of the numbers for top engineering programs like MIT, UCB, Caltech, Stanford, etc.?</p>