<p>As a late 1980s Computer Science grad of a Cal State U., and as a hiring software engineering manager in the Silicon Valley, I can tell you that the majority of companies care not where you went to college, but what you know and how self motivated you are.</p>
<p>I think the most critical thing in Comp Sci is to get good internships. That means if you go to a lesser known school you’ll need to be proactive - that means you start looking in the fall. By February/March most of the best ones are already gone. </p>
<p>I also think it was very helpful for my son that he’d already started working when he was in high school - so he already had on his resume work that he’d done on websites for the World Health Organization, Sky and Telescope and the Oxford English Dictionary as well has having been in the acknowledgements of a scientific paper.</p>
<p>Also along the lines of being proactive…knowing how to teach oneself a language is a handy skill and leads to interesting assignments.</p>
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<p>Also, drop the commonly held belief around these forums that there are only three to five good companies for a CS graduate or intern to work at (you can probably figure out which ones they are, since they keep getting named).</p>
<p>“Settled for Yale.”</p>
<p>lol. This place is so funny sometimes.</p>
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<p>It’s always confused me as well. People seem to think just working at Apple or Microsoft means you made it big. There are people who work at Apple for 1/3 as much as someone working the same job at a small software firm with more flexibility and maybe even an ownership stake and potential to make millions if things go well. It’s perplexing.</p>
<p>But hey, if everyone thinks it’s a status symbol to chase the most stressful/under-appreciated corporate position available straight out of school, that works for everyone else who wants the good jobs. </p>
<p>You just have to wonder where the careers of the founders of stuff like Paypal, Facebook, Youtube, Plentyoffish, Google, etc would be today if straight out of school they started begging for a backroom debugging position at IBM for the “prestige”. Probably an outsourcing center in India.</p>
<p>It’s kinda the same when people say they work for a Fortune 100 company or something like that.</p>
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<p>Not everyone does that. Mathmom’s DS refused to settle for Harvard and he’s happy about it even 5 years later. He made a wise decision.</p>