I’m a bit perplexed about helping guide my son with his transfer options for CS.
He started out at Maryland last year but dropped out for a myriad of reasons when he withdrew first semester. We have come to the conclusion that he will likely perform better at a smaller school. He has been enrolled at our local CC and doing well while we try to figure out his transfer options.
He’s a bright kid. We live in Florida. He wound up at UMD after high school since it had the “best” CS program he got accepted into. In the end, it was not a good fit. He was rejected from Carnegie Mellon and Georgia tech CS programs first go around, so those are not likely to be in play as a transfer. Most of the smaller schools we look at don’t seem to offer much in the way of significant CS depth or breadth.
Any suggestions? The transfer process seems so vague and variable compared with the application process out of high school.
What is his GPA? How many credit hours has he completed or will complete? Will he have the equivalent of two years of college? If no, you will need to check whether or not he needs to submit a SAT or ACT score.
He will have just under the credits needed for an AA after this semester with a very good GPA in our local college. His ACT score was 35 two years ago.
Professors from the following LACs appear to have been among the first to design a model CS curriculum for liberal arts colleges. These schools may therefore offer some of the more established programs of their type (listed in approximate order of key, upper-level courses offered at least biennially):
Hamilton
Swarthmore
Williams
Grinnell
Allegheny
Vassar
Washington & Lee
Colgate
Denison
Amherst
Bowdoin
You can screen these schools by selectivity and other factors of importance to you.
(Sources: The Liberal Arts Computer Science consortium and table provided by ucbalumnus.)