I am getting a lot of mixed reviews on their program. Some say it’s too new, or the weakest part of their school. Others praise it, and say it does very well in the job market.
I hear a lot about Northwestern being a very academically rigorous school (to the point where it is common for somestudents to commit suicide each year?) but I am not sure if that extends to Computer Science.
Personally when I saw their course descriptions, how many courses they have you take, how they break courses into breadth, depth, and projects I was very impressed.
What is your review of the school’s computer science program?
How does it stack up against the following computer science programs at other schools (Sorry for the big list, usually I am able to get a better feel for the prestige of a CS program but I can’t really tell, I am also biased by how much I like their campus):
Yep, that’s Northwestern, not Northeastern. Also overblown.
Northeastern’s CS program is very strong - it has a really solid teaching philosophy and covers everything you’d need in CS. When I applied to a very similar sampling of schools, I chose Northeastern CS over the others for the program. It wasn’t against as many of the bigger names here, to be fair, but I am a very big proponent of the program - I actually TA the introduction course here.
As far as rankings go, prestige is really not that important in CS. The big names have an impact, but otherwise, they are really pretty similar in terms of content. The difference, which is harder to judge unless you have a lot of info, is the teaching.
Mudd, UCB, and Caltech all have huge names in CS, up with MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc. The others would be a similar tier to each other, a single tier below those guys. If I had to choose in a vacuum, I would go Northeastern over Northwestern, but they are very different programs. Northeastern, of course, emphasizes the application of CS with co-op while Northwestern is more liberal arts and has a much smaller department, which they are currently expanding out and making some bigger improvements in.
Wow my bad, I guess I confused myself when I was writing this. I think i understand NorthEasterns CS program, it is NorthWesterns CS program I am not sure about (kinda wondering if moderators would let me change the topic name, or mabye I should start over with a new thread).
Anyway this is still all GREAT info.
I do agree that nEasterns co-op program is a huge benefit to it, but couldn’t I just do internships over the summer and go to nWestern and get similar benefits?
There’s a few big difference between co-ops and internships.
The difference between 3 and 6 months is very significant because of the time spent getting up to speed. If you spend 2 months at a company learning their tech stack, you get about 1 month of tangible work out of an internship while you get 4 out of a co-op. In any technical field, a month or more is a very standard amount of time for getting up to speed.
Internships are good, but co-op is a real investment from a company. 50% of NEU students get a full-time job offer from a co-op on graduation.
Overall, yes, getting experience in either form is good and will do, but the differences are significant IMO. Frankly, it can be a lot more significant in fields other than CS, where internships are common and plentiful at the moment. Still, the quality of career services at NEU should be noted as well - having the connections with so many companies nationwide and internationally makes a difference. Every year for CS, Intuit, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google all take at least a few CS co-op’s from NEU, and the same can be said for many other companies, some with big names, some with smaller ones but ones that still offer great experiences.
In terms of the departments themselves, NEU offers more courses and degrees, and lots of different specialties, from cyber security to data science to information science. They offer research specialties in programming languages and networking. While Northwestern’s department is growing with the field and deserves credit for that, it’s not there yet.
@cubby208 some similar benefits can be obtained with a summer internship but honestly it’s a different ballpark to be a co-op. While most college students do one internship the summer before senior year (and the ambitious minority may have one their junior summer as well), that amounts to about 3 months of work as an intern. This work is often low-level and unpaid/poorly paid. Northeastern co-op students have 18 months of full-time work experience on their resume, no intern fluff, especially in CS imo; a co-op really is significantly more relevant than an intern. They are also paid tremendously well. For some but not all industries, you may have significantly more work and thus experience as a co-op vs. summer intern; for example, as an accountant, the co-op cycle Jan-June hits the big tax season and deadlines, so the work I did was WAY more than that of a summer intern. There were also several times more of them (because everyone else wants to work in the summer when they have off from school), further reducing what they actually contributed.
Northeastern is also strong in cyber security with a good cryptology program and strong links to industry and government. It even has a large center for Homeland Security, but I am not sure how much CS is done there. So if you are interested in those kinds of things, NU might be a better option than some others. Also, the coop program is a huge advantage.