It is at the end of my college application process and all of my schools have released their results. Now I am deciding between Umass Amherst (Honors College) and University of Richmond to enroll for Computer Science major. I don’t intend to get a job immediately after graduation but want to apply for a CS grad school. As for me, I prefer learning CS in general in undergrad before following a concentration / track later in grad school, but I don’t know whether it will be harder for me to apply for a top CS grad school if I do not follow a track and take grad-level courses in undergrad (which are provided by large research university). I apply for Richmond because it has a very prestigious Business program and I also plan to major/minor in Business Administration along with CS.
I would be very grateful if someone can help me to make my decision. I am an international student, so there are many things in U.S education that make me very confused.
@ucbalumnus Could you be more specific? I mean how can that help me to choose between the two schools? As far as I know, Umass Amherst has many more courses (including grad-level courses) since it is a large research university. This is the link to Richmond’s CS courses: http://cs.richmond.edu/courses/index.html. Do you think they are good enough for an undergrad student?
Either program looks fine. There isn’t that much that distinguishes undergraduate CS programs from school to school, unless you’re on a specific track like games or security.
Graduate schools won’t care whether you’ve been on a specific track or taken graduate-level classes as an undergrad. And I always wince when someone worries about prestige and CS. Prestige is much less relevant in CS or Engineering than it would be for other fields.
The Richmond CS courses look fine, but the class schedules at http://registrar.richmond.edu/planning/schedule/current.html and http://registrar.richmond.edu/planning/schedule/previous.html indicate that many of the 300-level courses are infrequently offered (perhaps once every two years). If you attend Richmond, you need to consider that you may have just one chance in four years to take some of those courses (once during junior and senior years, since you will be taking lower level CS prerequisite courses in your frosh and soph years), so you may not have as much schedule flexibility.
@ucbalumnus so I have to finish the prerequisites as soon as possible for having chances to take many courses at 300-level. Thank you very much, your advice helps me a lot
