<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I just wanted to know if the Computer Science & Engineering Department at Northwestern is good.</p>
<p>Is it as good as Cornell, UIUC, CMU, Princeton?</p>
<p>Thanks
Saatvik</p>
<p>Short answer for if its better than those schools you listed for cs: no</p>
<p>Agreed, but let's give a long answer too.</p>
<p>asaatvik, I wanted to study at any college in the United States that offered a top-drawer computer science program so I applied to Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc. even though my chances were slim. But Northwestern was the best CS school that admitted me, so I had to put up with it and try to figure out how good their computer science was. That's what I think now(have in mind that I'll be a freshman in September, so I've seen nothing first-hand yet):
-- CS is generally not as good as many other McCormick (NU's eng. school) programs;
-- Currently, CS profs. run several research groups or whatever you call them. Robotics, computer graphics... Check them out at the department's site.
-- McCormick is actually making the effort to improve CS. A large new building is due to be finished September, and it was originally announced to be the new home of the computer science department. However, there is no longer a "computer science department" because the new dean Ottino has recently announced the union of computer eng., electrical eng., and computer science into the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. I like that since this is how CS operates at MIT and several other similar schools. Plus the dean also says they're thinking of hiring more algorithms professors. Hope this becomes real.
-- Finally, the really big difference among CS programs comes at the graduate level. Sure, there must be some difference between CS at MIT and CS at Amherst College simply because of the greater number of profs., ergo, variety of courses. But the difference between MIT and Northwestern is probably not as big. However, I don't know how important your college is when it comes to applying graduate.</p>
<p>Check out the site of the current computer science department.</p>
<p>One more thing:
-- NU CS professors earned their Ph.D.'s at these schols: MIT (3), Yale (3), Stanford, Georgia Tech (3), Berkeley (3), CMU, UIUC, Uni Chicago, Princeton, Uni Michigan, UPenn, Uni Utah, Rice, University of London, and Northwestern itself (2 or 3). If these are the really huge CS schools, then our professors know their stuff, right?</p>