I’ll be leaving BU but I had a great two years. This is a student’s perspective on the CS program and department. A website can tell you about the curriculum and requirements, but I can tell you my experience. Feel free to ask me any questions and private message me.
-Education
First off, the only degree offered at BU is a Bachelor’s in Arts in Computer Science. All majors in the College of Arts & Sciences are offered as BAs. Do BA or BS matter when getting a job? Not at all! They’re just different based on general requirements but they typically take the same CS classes.
Pretty much most CS programs and curriculums are similar because the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) has a standard for undergraduate CS programs and requirements. Professors at BU tell me that the program is considered more theoretical because the CS program grew out of the math department. Personally I’m a fan of theoretical CS but if you’re interested in an applied education, you have the options of not taking as many theoretical classes.
Your first CS class, if you don’t have the AP credit, is Introduction to CS 1. The course is taught in python and is generally very easy. The following course is Data Structures, which is taught in Java. You’ll learn how to build your own data structures and learn some basic sorting/searching algorithms. Afterwards, you’ll take Computer Systems, where you learn about how data is represented in computers, assembly language, caches, etc. You’ll also take an introductory discrete math class, a linear algebra class, and then options to take probability or applied abstract algebra. Algorithm analysis, considered the most difficult class in the curriculum, is required for all majors. There are also 300 level requirements and you get to choose 2 out of the three - programming languages, computing systems, or theory of computation. The rest are electives. Some people will double in math + cs, or cs + econ. Whatever floats your boat!
Some of the professors are actually awful teachers. Before signing up, make sure to check your professor ratings. If a bad teacher is teaching a class, I’d say wait out a semester or two. The good professors at BU are Professor Sullivan, Professor Snyder, Professor Matta, Professor Appavoo, Professor Byers, and Professor Crovella.
Avoid Professor Gacs, Professor Levin, and Professor Xie. Seriously.
-Extracurriculars
We have a small, tight knit community. I think we have around 300 CS majors, 30% female 70% male. There are a bunch of great student groups.
CS student groups at BU:
BUILDS - have a small hacking room in the Math & CS building, hold awesome workshops, also has a small ctf/security group.
Global App Initiative - group of students who build apps for non-profits.
Open Web - selective club of students dedicated to building quality software
Women in CS - community for everyone with goals of encouraging and educating about women in cs. Also bring in a lot of top companies to campus.
MakeBU - weekly hack nights
BU HPC club - high performance computing club; they compete at a lotta competitions
There’s also a facebook group for CS majors. The people and professors are supportive. Professors are always open to having undergrads join their labs. Getting research is important, especially if you have grad school in mind.
-Job Search, Career stuff
There are a bunch of job fairs at BU. The fairs to look out for are the fairs for the College of Engineering students. CS isn’t in College of Engineering, so you’ll have to look up on ENG’s website. They try to be exclusive about their fairs haha. Also look out for the startup job fair! That’s a lotta fun.
We’ve had Google, Yelp, and GE hold tech talks here. No one’s going to hand you a job or internship, and you’ll have to network and work hard for yourself. We honestly don’t have strong tech connections, but with hard work you can be successful.
I like the CS department here because of the people and the community. We’re not a top CS school, but we have a supportive community. Everyone helps each other.