I am debating between Tufts and NYU Poly (accepted to Honors Program as well).
Equal financial aid package from both. I’m gonna visit them soon.
For now, I want to know more about both schools in terms of:
_academic rigor & support
_internship & career opportunities
_social life
Any opinion is much appreciated!
Best of luck to you. I have a son who is a junior majoring in CS in the Engineering School at Tufts and a daughter who is a freshman in Arts and Sciences at Tufts. Re: CS, the program is very highly regarded and in much demand. It is academically very rigorous but the students also tend to work in teams to support one other. My son has just landed a good paying summer job in the CS field in MA, which he found out about through attending one of the career fairs they often hold at Tufts. Can’t really respond to the question about social life, not knowing where you are from and what you are looking for. The Medford campus at Tufts is very nice, feels as safe as you could want, though it’s more suburban, and if you want the city, Boston is a short T ride, and my daughter does that a lot. There’s Greek life at Tufts, though it’s not huge. Most importantly for us, the students at Tufts are very friendly, and seem very happy. That’s one of the things we liked about it over other demanding schools, namely that there’s a balance between academic rigor and still having fun and enjoying life.
@reesievan Thanks for your response. I have also heard a lot that there is a better sense of community at Tufts. Congrats your son on landing an internship!
Does anyone else have other opinions? 
I have a son in Tufts. Chem major. I myself went to poly for electrical engineering. Before it was nyu Poly. No question in my mind. Tufts all the way. You will have no social life at poly. A lot of professors barely speak English and have a very heavy accent so very difficult to understand. TAs teach a lot of classes and they have really heavy accents. If you’re a guy, there are very few girls at Poly. If you’re a girl, the guys are very nerdy and geeky and don’t know how to behave around girls. It’s true that I went there million years ago. But my cousin’s son just graduated from Poly and he had the same experience.
The only good thing Poly has going for it is it has a great job placement program. Outstanding actually. A lot of companies come to I terview on campus. All my friends had jobs by the time they graduated. Don’t know much about Tufts job placement for engineers. Poly graduates also consistently rank as top engineering starting salaries.
Poly is very preprocessional and Tufts has a liberal arts atmosphere.
Feel free to ask me anything else about Poly. All I can tell you is if I had to do over again I would of chose differently. I didnt have a typical college experience. Lived at home. A very large % of Poly students commute. Don’t know exact number. When I went it was almost everyone. But I had a job when I graduated even though we were in the middle of recession.
In fact, I beamed on reading “Poly is very preprofessional and Tufts has a liberal arts atmosphere.” I actually care a lot about being well prepared for the working environment upon graduation. That said, a social life, which possibly help with networking, also matters. I am really obsessed with internship and working right now Might change my mind later. Will see after the visits to both schools soon.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your feedback. It’s super informative! Feel free to add in anything if you need to!
D1 is a senior at Tufts in CS. She entered Tufts intending to be an International Relations major, took an intro CS course for breadth, and, well, here she is.
Academic rigor–check. Support–check. That’s true both for the newbies who only come to CS in college and for those who’ve been coding since they exited the womb.
Internship and career opportunities–check. You can ask the department for a list of what companies students intern at, and where they go off to work. Internships run the gamut from the big name tech companies to corporate environments to working for non-governmental agencies abroad. Being hired for a full-time job post college–no problem. Support for D1’s job search–suggestions on where to apply, help with her resume, etc etc, all there.
Social life–check. True about the sense of community. D1 has loved her time at Tufts. She’s had some amazing, amazing opportunities ranging from lectures on campus to travel all over the world (funded by Tufts).
Do go visit!
As a parent from the Boston area with a kid at NYU Poly, I can tell that there’s no comparison. Go to Tufts. The NYU Poly intro CS courses are bad. (I feel qualified to say this, after reviewing the course material, since I have 40 years industry experience and an MIT CS degree myself.) I can get very specific about this if you’d like. The first course – CS1114 is supposed to be Introduction to Computer Science, but its really about memorizing obscure artifacts of Python (from this course one would think the most important principle of computer science is what the * operator does when used on strings), never relating them to general CS principles. The problem sets are entirely uninteresting – mostly meaningless text manipulation. By the end of semester they’re doing exciting things like keeping bank balances.
The second course on Object Oriented programming has similar problems, focusing on the edge cases of C++, rather than serious principles of Object Oriented design. But that course is even harder (I was aghast when in the freshman orientation the admissions lady actually admitted that 30% of the students flunk this course, yet they’ve done nothing to change it.) My son lost 15% on his first exam for not putting “const” declarations on methods with no side-effects (i.e. his code was completely correct, but with the const declaration the compiler might be able to optimize it slightly better).
Don’t even get me started on the required two-semester writing program. They’ve turned it over the NYU, so the engineering students are now being forced to write literature criticism graded by frustrated Adjunct faculty (read: English majors, who couldn’t get real faculty appointments anywhere, being paid a pittance to teach these courses).
Before they started breaking out statistics, NYU Poly had a 60% graduation rate in six years (vs. Tufts’ 90%). Of the four kids in my son’s freshman suite, two have already left the school, and the other two (including my son), don’t plan on re-registering for next semester. My son simply says the school hates its students.
@jparent6 I see the school didn’t change much since I graduated almost 30 years ago. As I said in my previous posts it’s an awful place to go for 4 years. You’ll have no life and no real college experience. When I was there the drop out rate was huge. I guess I did pretty good since I graduated with a 3.5 with a computer engineering degree. But I would never ever recommend this school to anyone.
I am a Tufts EE alum with a daughter who is currently attending Tufts as an LA major. I secured multiple jobs on campus and an internship in Boston the summer after my junior year. I continued working half-time during my senior year (traveling from my dorm to Boston via public transportation). I received multiple job offers from companies inside and outside the Boston area upon graduation during the recession of the early '80’s. I chose to pursue a career in the local computer industry.
My daughter (as an LA major) had an on-campus job and has had jobs every summer including an internship in Boston the summer after her junior year. She also continued her internship half-time during her senior year. She picked up a second (low hours) internship during her senior year, as well as a “Winternship” (a special Tufts program) during the winter break. She landed most of her positions through networking which she learned how to do via multiple workshops/coaching offered through the Tufts Career Center.
80% of Tufts Engineers have at least one internship and 40% have two or more.
http://engineering.tufts.edu/industry/internships.htm
The nice thing about Tufts’ location is that it is possible to perform internships during the school year as well as the summers. For CS majors, this is particularly true because the Boston area high tech start-up community is migrating from the suburbs into the city along the subway line that connects Tufts/Harvard/MIT and the new downtown Innovation District. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have development groups in Kendall Square - 4 miles form Tufts via subway.
The undergrad Engineering/CS curriculum is both innovative and teaching focused (due to the LA culture) rather than “weed-out” focused. The average attrition rate for engineering schools nationwide is 40%. At Tufts, it hovers around zero, and in some years it has been negative (more transfer in than out). There is enough leading edge research going on that there is a wide range of advanced courses available - comparable to the top research-focused universities. The “Liberal Arts approach” tends to pay additional dividends in mid-to-late career, providing the critical thinking and communication skills as well as the breadth of perspective needed to take on leadership roles vs. working under the guidance of others.
http://www.cs.tufts.edu/About-CS/cool-facts-about-cs-at-tufts.html the
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-by-type/bachelors/research-universities