Pls rate top 5 comp. sci. UG (job+academic) from the following list?
OSU; NCSU; UofU; Northeastern; Stevens; RPI; ASU; UofAriz; CWRU; CooperUnion; Lafayette; Wesleyan; Colgate; Emory
Throw out Cooper Union, since it doesn’t have a CS program. Otherwise, you might as well pull numbers out of a hat to rank them. All the remaining schools are fine for CS.
I’d suggest figuring out whether you want to go to a bigger school with a greater choice in classes, at the expense of having to sit in lectures of hundreds of students, or a smaller school with a smaller menu of classes but more personalized attention. I went to a school with 50K students and then transferred to one with 3K students. The smaller school worked a lot better for me, but I know lots of people who did very well at larger schools.
Also, look at all the schools and see if any has a particular CS specialty or track you’re interested in.
It’s a little easier to find a job in a part of the country in which you went to school. So if you want to work on the east coast, go to an east coast school. If you want to work on the west coast, go to a west coast school.
simba9 thanks for your valuable input. would you be able to compare schools locally say OSU vs CWRU; RPIvs Stevens vs Northeastern.(maybe ignoring size and focusing on job and academic reputation). Thanks once again
Employers aren’t going to make much of a distinction between the schools on your list, except maybe if the the person hiring you is an alum of one of them. I guess my point is don’t worry about reputation. Undergrad computer science is pretty much the same everywhere, and teaching quality averages out. Everyone takes the same handful of core courses, and then you get to take three, four or five electives. But even for the electives, most people seem to take the same kinds of classes. That’s why I was suggesting you look for a specialty or track that interests you. It might help you stand out from the pack of people with the same, old generic CS degree.
The demand for programmers is great enough that employers don’t have the luxury of playing favorites among schools.
There will be a lot of jobs around NYC, so in that regard it would be easier to find a job there if you went to Stevens. Same with Northeastern and Boston, Emory for Atlanta, etc. And the bigger schools like Ohio State and Arizona State should have more recruiters than the smaller schools, just because it makes more sense for a company that’s looking for employees to go to a school with lots of CS students. Still, there’s nothing stopping you from moving to an area you want to work and then looking for a job there. That’s what I did.
As people often say here, because it’s true - what you know will matter to employers much more than where you went to school.
thanks. would you mind sharing the schools you attended the large and the small one.
It was a very long time ago, but I went to Ohio State (50K) my freshman year, and transferred to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (3K). After working for a few years, I went to night school and got my graduate degree at USC.