Best Undergraduate Programs in CS for Women

ordinarylives
Mon, 08 Feb 2016 18:14:02 +0000

well suited for women with little experience

What do you mean by that? That the program has a fair number of women in it or that it is geared toward students with little experience. In that case gender shouldn’t matter and @AccCreate did a pretty good job explaining that most schools assume little experience going in. I would really like to emphasize that fact. My youngest thought she’d hate computer science. Didn’t touch it in high school. Signed up for programming in college first semester because her math major required it and she didn’t want the awful thing hanging over her head. Well, long story short, she’s now a double major. She’s the first to admit that a number of students are far better coders/programmers, but programming languages are really the most basic level of a CS program. Without a strong math background, some of those kids “programming” since the age of ten stumble when they get to algorithms and beyond. I wouldn’t worry about the lack of programming experience if she’s got a good math background. And I certainly wouldn’t encourage online language classes before college. Ew. Any decent school will cover what she needs to know.

Now, number of women in a program is a whole 'nother matter. Some women are really uncomfortable being the “only girl” in a class while others are fine with it. I would imagine you’d have to check out each school individually for this data.