<p>I am going to attend UCLA for CSE this fall but I am surprised at the lack of information on CC about the program. I always felt that although UCLA was not at the level of CMU, Stanford, Berkeley, or MIT, it still had an excellent program for CS. Is it just me or is UCLA's CS program really underrated on these forums?</p>
<p>I think most people respect UCLA’s CS program, but it’s probably no better than places like Illinois, Purdue, Washington, and yes, even USC.</p>
<p>It’s hard to differentiate among undergraduate CS programs. I’ve worked with a lot of programmers, and no particular school outshines any other. Some of the best programmers I’ve worked with didn’t even have college degrees.</p>
<p>Most CS programs are over-rated if you look at it from the standpoint of producing good competent coders… Today’s graduates can’t even begin to understand what writing code in arcane languages on pitiful hardware without Google at your side looks like…</p>
<p>My thoughts have always been unless you have personally attended ALL of the schools in question yourself, as an undergrad, and completed the same program at each school, you have no means of comparison between the schools. Your only other method of differentiating between the various programs is by assessing, first hand, the performance of graduates from each schools. Not to mention having enough data points to make this type of assessment viable. Some people may be able to do this assessment, but most of the time they don’t have enough data points for a good comparison, so their argument becomes irrelevant.</p>
<p>The point I’m trying to make here is to stop making everything a damn heirarchy. All of those schools are fine. Pick the school that fits your personality and interests best.</p>
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<p>If anything that I have “enough data points” on after 23 years in the industry is that I cannot determine any performance/expertise trends from the graduates of various schools. I have worked at places where the “go to” person was from some local college. Another place had a “physicist turned software developer” as the “go to” person. I do remember one former employer where there was a CMU grad as a chief engineer who could almost answer any question we had. Hell, I led one team where my “star developer” was someone who took a break from college (West Chester Univ in PA with 1 year left) and could code anything in record time (bailed our team out a few times).</p>
<p>Last I checked they were ranked #19 nationally for undergrad CS - probably about right and definitely not undervalued.</p>