Which school is good for CS?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Hiii I'm a junior female student (international applicant from Brasil) and I wanna know which schools are good for Computer Science.</p>

<ul>
<li>Carnegie Mellon</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>UIUC?</li>
</ul>

<p>Those are the schools that I've heard so far... if you can gimme a list of colleges that will be a lot of help! :) Thanks in advance.</p>

<p>P.S. I kinda get a glance on the difference between CS and CE (Computer Engineering) but would anyone like to clarify me by explaning the difference between those two? THANKS SO MUCH!</p>

2

<p>Stanford!!</p>

3

<p>There are lots of good CS schools. This list includes a few that you can actually get into. Good luck.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.greguide.com/comps.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.greguide.com/comps.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

4

<p>Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, MIT... yeah.</p>

5

<p>jake those rankings I'm pretty certain are for graduate programs. Please correct me if I am wrong.</p>

6

<p>why would schools with strong grad programs not also have strong undergrad programs?</p>

7

<p>^Because a lot of schools have professors who only teach grad classes.</p>

<p>An example: MIT has a fine economics undergrad, but arguably has the number one grad school for economics. Linguistics has several very famous professors (like Chomsky), but they only teach grad school and the undergrad linguisitics is nothing special, while the grad school is one of the best in the nation.</p>

<p>So grad rankings can be very different from undergrad.</p>

8

<p>
[quote]
An example: MIT has a fine economics undergrad, but arguably has the number one grad school for economics.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>So, is your implication that the MIT undergrad econ program subpar? </p>

<p>
[quote]
Linguistics has several very famous professors (like Chomsky), but they only teach grad school and the undergrad linguisitics is nothing special

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Well, I don't know about that. After all, there aren't exactly a whole lot of undergrad linguistics programs out there anyway. But anyway, if you want to say that the MIT linguistics undergrad program is 'nothing special', then who exactly are all of these other undergrad linguistics programs that are so much better?</p>

9

<p>
[quote]
^Because a lot of schools have professors who only teach grad classes.

[/quote]

I'm not so sure about that. Even if it be the case, many aspiring juniors and seniors take graduate level courses...that's especially true for CS. Besides, undergraduate research is widely available in most of these schools.</p>

10

<p>"After all, there aren't exactly a whole lot of undergrad linguistics programs out there anyway."</p>

<p>Less than 150 offer it as a major, actually. Princeton, JHU, and very few other top colleges don't offer it.</p>

<p>"then who exactly are all of these other undergrad linguistics programs that are so much better?"</p>

<p>When it comes to undergrad, it's largely dependent on the breadth of courses, depth of study (in the key areas phonology, phonetics, syntax, semantics, morphology, along with other specific areas like psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and the like), language offering (breadth and depth), and other language resources like phonetics labs, language tables, ling organizations, etc. In addition, linguistics is one of those fields in which quality of faculty can make a big difference, as ling departments tend to be small; a mediocre professor can spoil a large part of the department.</p>

<p>Those who best fit the bill for undergrad: UCLA, Berkeley, UChic, UPenn, Cornell, Stanford, around there. MIT is, as someone said, better for grad school, as it seems to be subpar in comparison to the others in some areas such as language offering. MIT is better for theoretical ling, and its grad school is well known for it. Noam Chomsky was obviously the reason for bringing MIT to the forefront of linguistics, but since his retirement, some have thought that MIT's program has been "slipping," while others say it was never fantastic in the first place (Chomsky was the main attraction). As useless as undergrad rankings tend to be, here's Gourman's say:</p>

<p>UCLA
U Chicago
UC Berkeley
U Penn
Cornell
UC San Diego
Yale
U Illinois Urbana Champaign
Stanford
MIT
U Michigan Ann Arbor</p>

<p>I personally wouldn't go to MIT -- way too limited, too small (the ling department), not enough breadth/depth in the various areas, especially since there are other universities that, to me, seem obviously better (UCLA, for example -- to be expected, considering its location where some 220 languages are spoken).</p>

11

<p>I thought this was a thread about computer science...where did all the linguistics geekiness come into play. Goaash!</p>

12

<p>Someone challenged an example used to help to understand a ranking, which was to show the OP the relative quality of comp sci programs.</p>

13

<p>
[quote]
I personally wouldn't go to MIT -- way too limited, too small (the ling department),

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I can't agree with that at all. Look at the figures:</p>

<p>The UCLA linguistics department has 28 total faculty. MIT has 21. Berkeley has 22. Seems entirely comparable to me. </p>

<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/index.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/index.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/faculty.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/faculty.htm&lt;/a>
<a href="http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>
[quote]
depth of study (in the key areas phonology, phonetics, syntax, semantics, morphology, along with other specific areas like psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and the like),

[/quote]
</p>

<p>
[quote]
MIT is better for theoretical ling,

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Looking at the research interests of the above faculty, I don't see that MIT is somehow significantly less 'broad' than the other 2 schools. Nor do I see any evidence to indicate that MIT is somehow more highly concentrated in theory - only a handful of MIT linguistics profs specialize in theory, not significantly more so than that at the other schools. Furthermore, while MIT obviously doesn't cover every single topic within linguistics, the other schools don't either. </p>

<p>As far as breadth of courses and language availability, I think what people continue to forget is that MIT has a cross-reg relationship with Harvard, which means that you can avail yourself to the entire Harvard language course catalog. And Harvard is only a few minutes away by public transportation. I highly doubt that you would run out of material to study if you do that. What matters is not what a school has within its own administrative borders, but rather what the school makes available to you as a student. </p>

<p>Hence, I see no evidence to believe that MIT is supposedly weaker when it comes to undergrad linguistics than the other schools.</p>

<p>But even if MIT linguistics was supposedly weaker than, say, UCLA or Berkeley, I would hardly call it 'nothing special'. As dubious as the Gourman ratings are, it still ranks MIT in the top 10. How can anybody seriously deem any top-10 program as 'nothing special'?</p>

14

<p>
[quote]
I can't agree with that at all. Look at the figures:</p>

<p>The UCLA linguistics department has 28 total faculty. MIT has 21. Berkeley has 22. Seems entirely comparable to me. </p>

<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/peopl...lty/index.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/peopl...lty/index.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/faculty.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/faculty.htm&lt;/a>

[/quote]
</p>

<p>To reinforce what I said before, you should also notice that many of the UCLA linguistics faculty themselves did their PhDs at MIT - in fact, equal to the number that did so at UCLA itself (and none did their PhD's at Berkeley). Furthermore, of the ones who did their PhD's at MIT, none of them seem to specialize in theory, which ought to knock down the contention that MIT's only real strength is theory and is less strong in other areas, for if that was true, then why would the UCLA Linguistics department be stupidly hiring all of these non-theorists from MIT? Is UCLA being stupid?</p>

15

<p>Minzzi: There is another thread discussing CS. Search for psionic.</p>