Feedback on School of Engineering and Computer Science at U of Denver

Hello, my D has been admitted and is considering attending University of Denver. She is interested in Computer Science/Engineering. She is trying to decide between University of Denver and a large State school in our State, which has a very strong engineering program. Her concern with our well known state school for her is the size. It is a very large school. Can anyone help us with the pros and cons of the engineering and CS programs at Denver? There are a lot of things she likes about the school. She loves the size, she loves the city environment, she loves Colorado, she loves the thought of living on campus the first 2 years. She is just not very sure of the engineering/CS programs. We are visiting in early April to try and figure some of this out but if anyone can help that would be great. Thank You!

My son is a senior at DU, majoring in CS (game design BS). He has a good friend who is a Mech E major. They both have gotten a solid education in their respective fields. My son was able to study abroad in the fall of his junior year, he’s done the required math minor and a theater minor, and his classes have been challenging (but not unreasonably so). (He had a high gpa and 31 ACT going in.)

He loves DU and Denver. He has enjoyed the small classes, and found his professors approachable and helpful. He has not pursued any internships, because he enjoyed teaching at iDtech summer camps the past two summers (his first summer he worked at University Tech Services, doing IT support, which he’d also done during his freshman year). He plans to work at iDtech again this summer and look for a permanent job after some necessary travel (family wedding back here in Hawaii mid-summer). He’s confident that he can find something in Denver, where he plans to settle.

Any specific questions?

Thank you for sharing this info. It is very helpful. My D will be doing an admitted student visit to DU in early April. I might have questions after that visit. Thanks again!!

We visited DU last summer with our son, who is a senior now. At that time, he was thinking he wanted to go into Computer Science (game design) - and DUs program seemingly was one of the best.

He absolutely fell in love with the campus (and the Denver area as a whole), but now he changed his mind on majors and it thinking of Mech Engineering. So our concern was that we weren’t looking at DU in terms of Engineering, so we’re concerned that it doesn’t have the same offerings as other schools he’s now looked at specifically for engineering (like Univ. of Cincinnati and RIT), particularly in the area of co-op programs.

In your opinion, how does DU stack up with some of the better engineering schools?

@soccerdad72 I don’t know about the engineering schools but my senior son is applying to DU Computer Science as he wants to major in game design…haven’t been able to visit yet. Do you know how big their comp sci program is there or game design major? Did you meet with anyone in that dept? Not much info about info sessions for specific majors on their website. Any insight would be appreciated! Right now it’s definitely in his top choices (mostly because of this major they offer). Thanks.

We did visit DU last summer (2017) and as part of the visit, we sat down with the chair of the CS department. Very informative meeting and he was extremely candid about things. I don’t recall how large the CS program was, but he did speak specifically to the Game Design program. Basic gist was this - it’s one of the better programs in the country, and their graduates generally are landing jobs, but because the industry, many of them are not making much, at least not nearly as much as a general CS grad is making programming for a Fortune 500 company. Most of the companies who are developing video games are small start up companies and therefore don’t pay the same as a large corporation.

We left the meeting with our son saying he’d rather go into general CS - and then after a year of robotics club, he realized he was much better at building than programming.