<p>I've heard it said that Carnegie Mellon's comp sci has a practical bent
while others like Princeton are more theoretically oriented. Could someone
shed more light on this? Does it sounds like a true statement? If yes what
other schools would fall more in the CMU practical camp and which the
more theoretical?</p>
<p>Any decent CS department should include instruction in the theory as well as give the student practice with computer programming assignments and projects.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, Princeton (strong math), Caltech (notorious for theory), and UChicago (dislikes application) have strong theory departments, while Stanford (entrepreneurial), CMU (focus on building), and Olin (engineering bent) focus on application. Large public universities (generalized), MIT (“mens et manus”), and several other colleges seem to offer a good mix of theory and application.</p>
<p>Personally, I prefer the theoretical approach since application can be more easily explored via extra-curriculars, but that’s just me. Out of curiosity, are you leaning more toward theory, application, or a mixture thereof?</p>
<p>@DiscipulusBonus My interest would be more in application that would let me work on a wide variety of commercial problems. I’ve grown up in Silicon Valley and so the adults I know are often Sr. Developers or former Developer-now-manager at many types of companies - from your Google/Facebook/Ebay to Juniper or Apple, from NASA to personal genomics. And then there are the startups. My uncle is a software developer out of Cal Tech and has worked at many startups of all different types from dental implant software to next generation slot machines for which he designed the operating system. Anyhow - there’s always a lot of interesting things going on here and being able to participate would be the thought.</p>