Congratulations to everyone who got accepted to UMd!
If you’ve already decided to go there, may I ask what your reasons were?
If you’ve decided not to go there, again, would love to know your reasons.
Is there a group that accepted students can join to exchange information?
I ask because my daughter got accepted to the CS program and is seriously considering this school.
Main reason is that UMDCP is very well known for CS (sometimes across the world), so your daughter will have higher chance of getting a job afterwards.
Chose to go to Maryland for engineering because of its stellar reputation, it’s ranked into the top 10 for aerospace, and in state tuition. It seemed silly to us to pay OOS tuition to schools such as Michigan, Illinois and Purdue. Maryland will provide the same opportunities and better. We were also very impressed at the engineering preview night. The students were cream of the crop. Lucky to be in state.
My son has been admitted to the CS program as well and is seriously considering it. He hasn’t made a decision yet, though. It’s between UMD, UCSB, UIUC & Rutgers.
My son and I were at the Admitted Students Open House this past Friday. The torrential rain all day took away a bit from the experience, but my son (and I) still came away very impressed.
His major is CS and was invited to join the FIRE program. He will choose between Northeastern (local) and Wisconsin (visiting in a couple of weeks). The only reason NU is in consideration vs. UMD is their co-op program.
I wrote up notes from the trip yesterday to send to his mom, which I have pasted below. They reflect areas important to my son. I wrote them up as a comparison to Northeastern, which is a very different experience.
Note that these are informal notes, so take them as such. For example, my notes about class sizes are based on what I have heard and read, and could be off. Feel free to correct me or add.
Pros:
Campus:
- Large and spread out. Takes ~20 minutes to walk from one end of campus to the other, but there are free buses. A lot of green areas, huge quads.
- Very different from Northeastern, which has tall buildings clustered in a small area
CS department:
- Ranked top 15, doubled in size over last few years, growing even more next year.
- Huge investments in CS. This is the new CS building under construction, ready next year: https://iribe.cs.umd.edu/
- Offer specializations in CyberSecurity and Data Science, just like NU. CyberSecurity is hot here because of local govt agencies like NSA, FBI, etc
- Encourage undergrads to do research, unlike other schools
FIRE program
- Only 500 out of 5000 students invited to join this research program: http://www.fire.umd.edu/
- Two year program that introduces undergrads to research in hot fields.
- You get to work closely with a Research Advisor prof, and collaborate with other students.
- For CS, he can choose Virtual Reality research, which is sponsored by Phillips. He could also choose CyberSecurity research which will be started soon.
- Summer fellowship opportunity in sophomore summer year with companies interested in your area.
- Great resume builder for jobs, as undergrads don’t typically have research credentials
Internships and Jobs
Cons/u:
**Co-ops are rare/b
- 2 month summer internships mostly.
Class Sizes:
- In the first year, several classes have 150+ students. In final 2 years, more like 50+.
- At NU, the class sizes in later years are around 12-14
Off campus:
- I found the area just outside campus to be off-putting.
We will visit Wisconsin in a couple of weeks, and he will then decide. Pre-visit, he is leaning towards UMD over Wisconsin because of climate, ease of travel (cheap non-stops to DC area from Boston), and location for jobs.
Good luck with your decision.
Your notes are so helpful! My daughter is still trying to make the decision on whether to go to Maryland for CS. We will be OOS. Our latest concerns are will it be extremely competitive in this program as there so many students in it?
@greentravel That’s a tough question to answer as it depends on many factors as well as the personality of your child.
Here are my thoughts when it came to my son; take them FWIW:
From the stats I had seen of students being accepted to CS and Engg programs at UMD, I feel my son is probably in the top half, so I think he should be ok. Granted stats are not necessarily a great indicator of success, but it’s all we have. I am influenced by this talk by Malcom Gladwell on the success of kids at elite vs. other schools. https://youtu.be/3UEwbRWFZVc?t=220
Having said that, I think other factors may influence each student differently. If they love the school (atmosphere, extra-curriculars, faculty, friends, etc), they could very well excel no matter where they stand with respect to their peers. More than his stats, I am guessing that my son will do well because UMD seems to fit his personality more. If he is enjoying the non-academic aspects, I think he will do well regardless of the competition.
If you haven’t already visited, I’d encourage you to take your daughter there. It was a huge eye opener for my son as he came away feeling he would fit in there.
Again, just my personal thoughts. Your mileage may vary.
Thank you so much. We have visited and she liked it a lot. The video of Malcolm Gladwell’s talk was fascinating, eye opening and very helpful. She got into the honors program at MD so I am assuming she might be in the upper half of admitted students for Computer Science but not sure if the stats are different for the general population of students as opposed to Computer Science students?
dont know if you are a big fan of rankings but you might wanna check this :
http://www.shanghairanking.com/SubjectCS2015.html
it constantly ranks among the top 20 in CS.
@FieldOfDaffodils I’ve been planning on attending UMD for it’s awesome CS program for a few years now, I live in Maryland so for me, the In-state tuition is a huge draw as well. But if your daughter is still wondering if she should attend for CS, you might want to check out the Brendan Iribe center for Computer Science on the UMD website. If she hadn’t seen it yet, it might just be the final straw that pushes her to choose Maryland. That thing is pretty incredible, and knowing I’ll get to work in it gets me so excited.
My son is doing mechanical engineering, so a little different, but chose UMD over Purdue, Virginia Tech, Northeastern, and Rutgers. Key decision points were location (big campus feel but near to big cities), reputation/rankings, and meeting faculty and students. As said in other posts, both students and faculty were impressive and made him feel comfortable there. We are NJ residents, and he got $$$ from Rutgers…but ultimately we felt this was the better choice.
@Quantify, I am also from NJ and totally agree that Maryland is the better choice!
@FieldOfDaffodils Thought you might be interested in this http://mcwic.cs.umd.edu/