Advice on transferring?

alecbenzer
Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:19:42 +0000

Was your high school elite in CS or STEM subjects?

Eh, sort of. It was a magnet school in NJ, and like I mentioned, I was in a CS “academy” they have. geohot actually went there - he’s probably our most famous alum. I don’t think we’re quite on par with places like Stuyvesant or IMSA (which seems to be popular around here), but it wasn’t just your average high school. The data structures class I mentioned was taught by an ex-Stanford math professor who also taught some advanced math courses (one of which I took).



Remember that universities design their freshman / sophomore courses based on reasonable expectations of what entering students had in high school

I realize this, but I feel like at other schools my situation might be less out of the ordinary, and so somewhat more accommodated for. Or, at the very least, I’d be among other people in similar situations that I could potentially learn from, which sort of feels like what makes college worth it in the first place.



Berkeley and Stanford do have a job recruiting advantage of being local to Silicon Valley computer companies, although UIUC is a common destination for those companies willing to send recruiters on airplanes.

Yeah, like I mentioned, my concern isn’t as much for job recruitment as it is for the courses and my peers. In the time I’ve been here we’ve had several job fairs with pretty prominent companies around (Google, Dropbox, Facebook). And it’s not like I think I’d be less happy at MIT or CMU than at Berkeley or Stanford just because the former two aren’t in Silicon Valley. I’m concerned less with perceptions and more with what it’s actually like (though having almost everyone I talk to about where I go to college respond with something that sounds like “why the hell would you come here/go there” is admittedly somewhat disheartening. I hope I’m being objective in my evaluation of the school, though)