Advice on transferring?

alecbenzer
Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:47:58 +0000

I know about OCW and was looking through the AI course once, though that was a while ago. It’d probably be a good idea to look through them some more (and at Stanford’s and Berkeley’s)



Why do they have such a low opinion of UIUC for CS? Rutgers in your home state is considered to be pretty good for CS, but UIUC does have a significantly higher reputation for CS (although Rutgers would have undoubtedly been much less expensive for a NJ resident).

Yeah, I got in to Rutgers, too - it would have been pretty cheap. It’s not cs people asking me why I picked the school for cs, really - just people asking why I came here in general. I mentioned I work at Wolfram - when I was interviewing there, one of the interviewers, upon finding out I was from New Jersey, asked “why * came all the way out here for college”. When we were visiting and we told one of the students that I got into NYU, they said, “you got into NYU? What are you even doing here?” When I was interning at Morgan Stanley and I’d talk to people about where I was going to school, they’d say things like “what made you want to go all the way out to Illinois?” (though, to be fair, when I mentioned it to someone in HR, they said “oh, yeah - that’s a really good school for computer science. is that what you’re going there for?” - which supports my perception that I shouldn’t be that worried in terms of recruitment) It happens a lot now that I’m here, too. The school just feels so overwhelmingly local at times that people are really surprised to meet someone not from Illinois (I think this is furthered by the fact that people from Illinois have circles of friends coming in as freshmen, so it’s easy to not notice some of the out-of-state people)



I’m surprised U of M has yet to pop up in this thread. Its also an elite CS school and you’ll probably get in.

As I mentioned, I’m not sure another state school (except possibly Berkeley) would improve things enough to make the transfer worth it, though if you have reasons to think that’s not the case I’d hear them (If I sound skeptical it’s just because I get the feeling a lot of CC posts end up being “you should come to [insert alma mater here]” without much consideration for context)