I am doing my college searching right now, and I have done some tours (Digipen, UT Austin, and UW Seattle next week). I have been continually frustrated at how little I learn about the CS program there in specific. Furthermore when I look for professors to email I am presented with a huge list, I have no way of knowing which of them is friendly and accepting of emails from lowly highschool students.
When evaluating a CS program I dont care so much about the prestige, but the culture there. Are people working on extra curricular (or curricular projects), are the people there dreamers, are they problem solvers or just smart, competitive, snobby? What do the work areas look like? How much personal critique does the professor give? Are the professors dedicated to your success? Are there people there that will care enough to realize if I have potential?
This is such a hard thing for me to see because in each tour so far you simply walk by the building, not to mention it is currently summer session at most schools.
Who do I talk to at big schools to figure some of these questions out?
I would talk to academic advising, and also place a call to the CS office at each school. They can point you to the correct people. When we were searching for our son we found the senior administrators very helpful. Some colleges (e.g. Michigan Engineering) have an open door policy. My best experiences have been though contacting the deans office.
If you ask admissions to link you up with a CS student via email to talk with, they willl often do that. If you do a visit while classes are in session, ask admissions if you can sit in on a class. Review the course offerings online carefully, too.
Are you dead-set on a large school for CS? Everything you are unhappy about is the opposite in a smaller school, where there may be 6-8 Prof’s in the department, they know everyone, and they teach all the classes instead of TA’s.
(I would also note that I do not believe UW allows direct admission into CS, so you run the risk of spending freshman year there and not being accepted and having to transfer.)
Post on the subforum for each of the university and ask your questions. With some luck, you might get a current CS student to respond about their experiences.
Repeat the same on red dit.com (after removing the blank).
Note that CS major is going to be very large these days in any of the large public universities. So, don’t expect a lot of direct interaction with professors.
Thanks for the clarification, UCB. So if a student does not get in initially, it can be difficult and it is certainly not guaranteed he/she will get in as a sophomore.
Another possibility would be to contact student organizations, like the campus ACM chapter, to see if you can get comments from someone there.
I think what you’re doing is good, trying to find out some particular things about the department you’re interested in at different schools – it’s one of the most important things, if not the most important. But it still would be good to consider some other factors that might cut down the scope some – for instance, what are your grades (unweighted) and test scores, what’s your financial situation, what are your preferences (size of school, size of community, geographic location, etc.), do you have any particular interests within CS. General CS curricula are pretty standard these days, and there are many good to very good schools out there. If you can cut things down based on some of those other factors, it would make the search easier, and help people suggest schools that would be appropriate.