I am in 11th grade and working to narrow down my list of colleges to apply to for a computer science degree. I am interested in applying to some schools in the northeast and am wondering which will provide me the best overall education. Ideally I would like smaller class sizes (don’t really care about the size of the overall university) and to be in or near a big city although this is not absolutely necessary. I do like the idea of a co-op program, but summer internships would also be ok. My list is:
RPI
WPI
RIT
Stevens Institute of Technology
U Rochester
Northeastern
Drexel
Lehigh
I am not from the northeast and would ultimately like to land a job on the west coast. However, I want the experience of living there for at least 4 years. Do any of these schools have good job placement in Seattle or San Francisco? Ultimately I will probably only apply to 4 of these schools, so any help with making my decision would be greatly appreciated.
^Bump, how good is Rensselaer’s CS program in terms of academics and job placement. Its one of the few schools that I am seriously considering.
Out of your list I applied to RPI and U Rochester and got into both. You should know that if you are even a half decent student that you will get a ton of financial aid from RPI. RPI has a lot of CS majors and a very solid program. Even though a lot of people haven’t heard of the school, people in industry have and like to hire RPI grads because of the low grade inflation and the work ethic of the students. Microsoft, Google, and other companies have hiring events for upperclassmen and a lot of great companies come for the career fair ever semester. If you make it out alive you won’t have trouble finding a job wherever you want in the CS industry,
@appollo1974 Thanks for the input. Does anyone know if it is easy to get placed at a west coast office or are most of the Microsoft/Google type jobs available on the east coast for students out of northeastern schools?
I know a number of students from my year (2011) ended up finding west coast jobs at Apple and a few others at Canonical, but I can’t tell you quite how common it is.
I’m pretty sure there’s a fairly strong RPI presence on the west coast.