How is University of Chicago for Computer Science major? And how difficult is it to get into that program?
- Difficulty is same for all majors
- Improving, but mediocre at best. Chapel Hill and UVA honestly have better departments from what I know with the exception of AI which Chicago is surprisingly good at (but not top still)
Wow, Dankjewel, you’re wrong on both counts.
UChicago admits NOT based on major from my view.
They recently recruited the head of CS for Berkeley. They’re honestly improving, and their AI is surprisingly good due to sharing faculty with the Toyota Institute. At least according to US News, both schools I listed above have better CS graduate programs.
Ok, the first point was ambiguous. If you’re saying that the odds of admission to the college don’t depend on your likely major, that’s accurate. Once admitted, not all majors are equally difficult. CS is a particularly demanding major at UChicago. It’s a very theoretically- and mathematically-oriented CS department. Certainly not mediocre, just not mainstream. It provides an exceptional education if this is the kind of CS education you want.
Pardon me for sounding a bit personal here.
From your other posts, I can deduce that you are applying to U of Chicago as an undergrad and you are a foreign student. But you are sounding as if you know everything about the U of Chicago admission process and the university itself. You are giving advice to other applicants as if you were working at Nondorf’s office. Frankly, I am surprised. If you have the insider information on how Nondorf’s team functions, by all means share it with other anxious parents and applicants. If you are just speculating, I would strongly recommend you to defer the advisory role to other more seasoned U of Chicago thread writers (Disclaimer: not me).
This is true, but many CS grads frankly, don’t aim for a graduate school level proficiency (most don’t go on to have a PhD in CS) and usually go straight to the work force. In that manner, I would consider the CS program more “mediocre” compared to other state schools which have a more “practical focus.” I agree most UChi majors are rigorous, and CS is one of the more rigorous ones, but IMO rigor doesn’t correspond to getting a job (or going to grad school) necessarily. In fact, the University is ranked pretty favourably in US news, considering rankings such as CS rankings and Shanghai ranks the University as much lower. IMO, it isn’t the quality, but rather the focus doesn’t match up with the demands of current CS field, but this fact would be concerning as a CS major.
Depends on the CS major and his or her ambitions. Almost by definition, doing cutting-edge work is very different from meeting the job demands of the current CS field.
To address the unanswered question in OP’s post, once admitted to the College, students choose their own major (often sometime in their second year). So CS isn’t difficult to get into (i.e. it’s not a restricted major) — you start taking courses and see if you enjoy and can handle the work.
FWIW, here’s a description of recent hires and the direction(s) the department sees itself moving in:
https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/news/new-computer-science-faculty-bring-expertise-security-big-data-mobile-networking-and-hci
From someone whose first job out of undergrad is programming, I say learning the theory is the most important aspect of your CS educatoin. With the correct understanding of the math behind compute cycles, and logic behind mutitasking, multiplexing, object oriented programming, artificial intelligence, database management and “data science/machine learning”, one would be ready to handle any new language or trend. The math orientation is important since most of applied CS nowadays deals with so mcuh (too much) data. If however you want to be a tech support, a tester or something basic, you can easily get those with a “practical” hands-on language specific education.
For cutting edge CS work, one has to do MS or PhD.