<p>Hello everyone,</p>
<p>How does Yale's Computer Science program stack-up against Harvard's, MIT's, Brown's, Stanford's, Penn's, etc? Is Yale's CS department renowned? Does anyone here know much about it? I have heard that, in the first year, you don't take many classes in your major and get a more broad education; is that correct?</p>
<p>Thanks a lot for your help! :)
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<p>The upper level courses are certainly rigorous: people taking 35 hours on a pset isn’t unheard of. Given the size of the major, job placement is very good (a lot of people working at places like google, algorithmic trading firms and top start-ups). I don’t know much aside from that!</p>
<p>At the undergraduate level, Stanford and MIT are in upper tier that includes Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley. The rest of the schools on your list are roughly on par - with Yale more toward the bottom of the list both reputation-wise and because of the smaller faculty size (this is from the outside looking in so anyone please correct me if I am wrong).</p>
<p>You are correct in that Yale does strive to make more of a broader education available to their CS majors which they state on their CS homepage:</p>
<p>“Each program provides a solid technical education yet allows students to take the broad range of courses in other disciplines that is an essential part of a liberal education. As a result the total number of required courses is somewhat lower than at other schools. Some students use this freedom to complete a second major, such as Economics, Music, Political Science, or Theater Studies.”</p>
<p>That being said, studying CS at any school tends to one of the hardest majors because it is so workload intensive as schrodingerscat has pointed out.</p>
<p>Why Computer Science? What do you want to learn? All the schools on your list offer basic CS courses, such as Operating Systems, Programming, Data Structures, Compliers etc. However Stanford, Brown and Carnegie Mellon offer more “creative” options such as Virtual Reality, Motion Capture, Computer Vision, 3D Computer Animation, iPhone and IPad Applications etc. For the most part, those types of CS courses are NOT taught at Harvard and Yale which tend to concentrate on the purely academic (as opposed to creative) CS.</p>
<p>As a current student, I’d like to correct/clarify some of what gibby (who I tremendously respect and whose advice on this website really helped me out when I was applying). Yale takes the position that its CS department should stick to the business of computer science. As none of the “more creative” options gibby lists are actually computer science (with the exception of computer vision, which is a burgeoning subject that is in fact taught by Yale’s CS department), but rather applications of computer science in the way that agriculture is an application of biology and chemistry, Yale’s CS department does not offer them. With regards to creativity, though, I would argue that designing artificial intelligence algorithms to win a board game and pitting them against those of your fellow classmates (as occurs in the intro to CS course here) takes a great deal more creativity than learning some objective-c and aping examples in order to throw together an iPhone app.</p>
<p>But let’s be honest. Any student capable of getting into Yale should be able to pick up these skills (web design, app programming, etc) on their own pretty easily given sufficient motivation, so for a student interested in studying CS at Yale I think the opportunities to use and hone these skills are far more valuable. Thanks in large part to the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, there are tons of student groups doing all kinds of neat engineering projects, the majority of which include some computer science. For those interested in tech entrepreneurship, there’s a ridiculous amount of support, from seed funding to legal/accounting services to meetings with VCs that the school basically arranges for you. As far as recruiting for CS jobs goes, we have multiple companies visiting every week and basically throwing offers at people; I have a friend who went to an info session for a rapidly growing California-based startup, talked to the presenter afterwards, and got offered a position on the spot, without ever submitting a resume or going through an interview or anything. Every year, Yale sends lots of CS graduates to fill the best CS jobs, notably at the famous trifecta of Facebook/Google/Microsoft.</p>
<p>Basically, you can accomplish just as much or more at Yale as a CS major as you can at any other top school. This decision should come down to other factors.</p>
<p>^^ Good advice. My nephew graduated with a degree in CS from one of the other schools on the list and there were plenty of high paying job offers to go around. Interestingly, he said that some of the most coveted jobs (Google, etc.) were more often offered to the girls in his class. This is a good sign if you are a female interested in CS.</p>
<p>Lots of opportunities for grad school as well.</p>