<p>Hello everyone! I'm currently trying to decide between these three schools, and was wondering if anyone has some extra insight on them?</p>
<p>Just some brief points I like about each of them:</p>
<p>Umass Amherst
+ cheapest
+ great CS program (from what I've heard)</p>
<p>WPI
+ project-based curriculum (I like the hands-on aspect)
+ only take 3 classes at a time</p>
<p>Northeastern
+ come out of school with a year and a half of work experience (co-op)
+ in boston</p>
<p>My main concern is making sure that I will be able to find a job after college. From what I can tell, WPI and Northeastern are really awesome for this (not so sure about Umass).</p>
<p>Anyone have experiences they are willing to share regarding these three schools?</p>
<p>We’ve hired a lot of WPI graduates over the years (BS, Phd) with very good results. This is for research and development work. We don’t have a lot of UMass Amherst grads because we don’t actively recruit at the school but their program has a good reputation and the people that I personally know that went there are great engineers or managers now.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that Northeastern’s CS program is a little more practice-oriented than theory-oriented from a co-worker and that her husband was fairly disappointed with the grads that he interviewed from Northeastern. There are employers that want a heavy theory-background and employers that want more practical skills and the universities are somewhat caught in the middle. Our company prefers the heavy theory background. This means that grads come in with fewer directly applicable skills so we spend the time training them in our environment. This takes a while.</p>
<p>Another employer may want you to have practical skills (LAMP, Postgres, iOS development, Android Development, C#, networking tools) so that you can be productive immediately.</p>
<p>Neither is wrong - it’s just a matter with meeting different demands by employers.</p>
<p>Here’s an example on a particular example of an employer wanting CS taught in a certain way. He wants pointer-type languages to be taught while there is a lot of demand for Java or Python skills in the marketplace.</p>
<p>I used the “facing of seg dumps” to point out the differences between CS grads and IS/IT grads. I also wondered if the schools that use C++ as the introductory language cover pointers.</p>
<p>Also recursion is covered in upper-level combinatorics classes which are optional for most CS majors but required for the Math/CS or Computational Math majors.</p>
<p>This would be a good spin-off topic</p>
<p>END OF TANGENT…BACK TO OP’s QUESTION…</p>
<p>I have to say that I have worked with a few UMass-Amherst CS or Math/CS grads and they all “knew their stuff” quite well.</p>