<p>I was wondering how good of a school Umass was for computer science. I saw on USnews that for graduate school in CS, umass was ranked 20th, along with such schools as Duke and Yale. Does this mean that the undergrad CS experience at Umass is as good as those schools?</p>
<p>Spacepope – you seem like another poster on College Confidential from Western Massachusetts.</p>
<p>UMass is very good for graduate computer science and a lot of thier faculty has Ph.D’s from top schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, at University of Texas at Austin. However, the teaching is probably not amazing because a lot of these people are focused almost solely on thier research and graduate teaching. They get a lot of NSF grants and what not but when you look at the final outcomes (jobs/grad school), they are not quite as strong (likely because thier intake of students is weaker). Top students get good jobs at IBM, Microsoft, and good start ups or a good masters programs and the very best students place at good grad schools for Ph.D. like Michigan and Texas.</p>
<p>The competition for MS and especially Ph.D. in Computer Science is fierce because you are competing with foreign graduates from India and China with perfect grades and good research. </p>
<p>The program is probably rigorous, at least judging from the rank. But the overall university resources are poor, nowhere close to Yale or Duke. You will not probably have much opportunity to do ground breaking research because they have a lot of MS and PhD students. Still, they had two goldwater scholars in the last five years, meaning that there are some very bright stand-out students who manage to do great research.</p>
<p>I think that OP was referencing information about graduate program but really wanted input from people regarding the CS UNDERGRADUATE program.</p>
<p>Any input?</p>