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.
Looks like your best bet is take a college tour on the East Coast. I know it may not be possible to visit all of them, but you can probably visit quite a few of them in one trip, see how you “feel” when you are on campus, which is very important. After you have visited one school, then you will have something for comparison when you visit the other schools.
I know people at Stevens right now. They are enjoying their time and education there.
We just visited WPI recently. The ONLY thing I did not care for was the city of Worcester. If you want to apply to WPI, apply EARLY action. Companies that recruit/hire from WPI tend to be regional, so it might not help with your plan to work in Seattle/SF (and this might be true for the rest of the East Coast school as well).
I notice your list is all private ($$$) schools. Consider going just a little bit further south for an excellent and respected public school CS program near a big city: UMCP. You owe it to yourself to at least check them out.
These are all good schools so there should be no problem heading to the west coast afterwards with a CS degree. WPI has great Career fairs twice a year and there are lots of companies who come and who recruit for various locations including Silicon Valley etc. The recruit for internships as well as permanent jobs.
Also, at WPI you could do an MQP project (senior capstone project) at many locations including two in California and these can provide good connections for later. The projects are sponsored by companies out there, My son was accepted to an MQP in Silicon Valley for example. And he has a friend who is heading to a job in California after graduating next month.
I know I’m a little late to the party here, but I have some (hopefully) valuable input here, as I’m a rising senior as well and live <30 minutes from and/or have visited many of these. I’m probably applying to a lot of these schools, so sorry for being so long winded… I have a lot to say
RPI- I can only speak for the location because I visited specifically for engineering and campus was empty for winter break when I went. So for location- the middle of nowhere. Troy is way past its prime. The most fun I had there was a cute coffee shop. It’s close to Albany, and campus activities make up for it, but the area has none of the cultural attractions that you might be looking for.
RIT- I live nearby, have many track meets here, and have done 2 overnight programs (one for engineering and one hack-a-thon). The importance that they place on co-ops is insane. You are required to do at least one in your 4 (or 5) years. Most students who do at least modestly (at least the engineering ones for sure) leave with a job lined up from their co-ops or other connections. Being from the area, however, I cannot speak on their west coa connections. The food is average but not horrible, and the campus is pretty and all brick. Only problem with the layout is that there’s the notorious “quarter mile” walk from the dorm to the class side of campus. It’s pretty miserable in the winter when the buildings create essentially a wind tunnel, but there’s several tunnels available to avoid the bitter cold.
U Rochester- Again, I live nearby and have track meets and soccer games here. I haven’t officially visited yet, but the campus is gorgeous and right on the Genesee River. Nearby isn’t the greatest section of ton, but it isn’t unsafe or anything. My high school comp sci teacher recently graduated from UR with a bio medical degree and LOVED it there. He’s one of the best teachers at my HS and clearly knows his stuff. My Dad also went here for his graduate degree and now has his own engineering business and does consulting work for the university.
Other than that, I’ve visited Northeastern but don’t remember much becasue that was the second college tour of the day (we did a whirlwind tour of MIT Tufts and Northeastern in 2 days)
Hope I could be of help! And if you have questions on the Rochester area, you know where to find me!
I would say that U of R and Northeastern will have a better western reach in some cases. WPI and RPI do have much better reps in the northeast region, while the two I mentioned do stretch better IMO. I applied to a very similar list myself and chose Northeastern.
WPI would probably be next in line for the reasons said above. NEU’s co-op program will also do that and more essentially. U of R is more for just general recognition that will transfer well out of the region. In the tech community, RPI has a good rep but I don’t know how regional that is and have no experience with it.
As far as narrowing down, what are you looking for? What are your chances at each?
Tiered By Difficulty
U of R, NEU, RPI, Lehigh
WPI, Stevens
RIT, Drexel
I personally applied to NEU, U of R, WPI, and RIT. RIT was my safety, the other closer to matches. RPI is great academically but wasn’t for me socially, and Stevens just missed the cut. Drexel I flat out don’t like much in any way, though it does act as a good safety. I would take RIT over it any day.
All of this is assuming a wash on financials. As others have said, figure that out as well.
I am a WPI Alum who works at Microsoft - Seattle. I’m presenting my honest opinion about the schools you’ve listed.
For CS, I would say NEU and U of R are the strongest programs on your list. WPI is much stronger for traditional engineering disciplines than for CS in my opinion. If you are interested in theory and research, U of R has strong research opportunities for undergrads and has a more academic feel. If you are looking for an industry job, NEU co-op opportunities are very good and Boston is an excellent city. Also consider UMASS-Amherst, which is an excellent CS school (ranked in the top 20, I would say both for undergraduate and graduate study).
WPI CS is a fine program. You can get a job at Google, Microsoft, or Silicon Valley startups with a WPI degree. I think all the schools you’ve listed have similar job prospects, with NEU the strongest. WPI alumni have also been admitted to PhD programs at Cornell, MIT, CMU, etc. But WPI CS doesn’t have the same research breadth or strength of NEU, U of R or UMass and is generally more geared towards preparing students for industry jobs. The computer science courses specifically appear to be slightly less rigorous at WPI when compared to NEU or UMASS. The WPI program is not easy for everyone but I don’t think it is particularly demanding, although that depends on the individual student.
Some of the strengths of WPI CS:
Relatively strong students
Good research in Programming Languages/Security, Human-Robot Interaction
Undergrads have the opportunity to work as Senior Assistants and assist in recitations/labs of CS courses
Flexible curriculum with relatively few required core courses, prerequisites are not enforced strictly
MQP forces all students to do a substantive capstone, which can either be research or design based. These projects are often sponsored by local corporations.
Weaknesses:
Weak/non-existent in some key areas of CS, such as machine learning, compilers, natural language processing
Teaching quality is not particularly strong
Research opportunities are limited
Look at the curricula of similar courses to get a better feel for what is covered at each university. Note that WPI’s academic schedule is different and thus courses cover around ~60-70% of a semester course at a comparable university but you take 7 courses/semester.
My ranking (based on CS quality, with a few more schools added for reference):
CMU, MIT, UIUC, Princeton, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Brown
Another note about WPI is that computer science courses tend to be more hands-on rather than theoretical, though theoretical courses are also offered and are taught well. Most CS programs only require one or two CS courses and the core (required) theory courses at WPI are not particularly demanding. I think this is possibly an issue at other CS programs as well.
If you are aware of the importance of theory, this is less likely to be a problem regardless of where you go. If you go to WPI, be sure to take the more advanced theory courses (CS 4120, CS 503). Also, be sure to take Linear Algebra II (MA 2073). An in-depth understanding of linear algebra is very useful, if not essential, if you are planning on graduate study in areas such as machine learning or robotics.
What this means:
In a more theoretical program, courses emphasize mathematical proofs of the runtime, correctness or error bounds of algorithms, theoretical reductions of algorithms, etc…
In a more practical program, the emphasis is on implementing (i.e., writing code for) algorithms or programs to solve specific problems and debugging issues in your code.
Both skills are important as a software engineer or data scientist (or whatever else you do as a CS major). Theory is something not typically encountered by high school students though and not really emphasized in startup culture, etc.
Being able to implement software makes it easy to hit the ground running at an internship or full time job. Most companies do not provide any meaningful training to new employees these days.
I think a lack of emphasis in theory is a weakness of WPI CS. Even though software engineers don’t write proofs at work, it is important to be able to reason about algorithms and solutions theoretically. This translates on the job into the ability to write code without bugs, to identify corner scenarios and write solid test cases and to being able to better understand and reason about code written by others. Understanding the theory well also makes it easier to reason about new systems, tools and programming languages (likely based on existing theoretical concepts) which have not have yet been invented.
