Computer Science at Brown University?!

spayurpets
Thu, 08 Oct 2015 22:22:14 +0000

My D is also in the CS department at Brown and has loved it. It is a smaller department than most and you’ll find more of an emphasis on undergraduates than at other schools where the grad students get top billing–Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Illinois. That’s got to affect how it’s ranked in the field by outsiders. But for an undergrad, it’s top flight. My D was interested in programming and was steered to Brown by an advisor who thought she would thrive more at Brown over a larger school. But it’s not like she didn’t have the chops to survive at other places; she was lauded as one of the top coders at a competitive summer program at MIT. It was a great choice for my D, and she was very quickly able to latch on as an undergrad TA as a sophomore. Andy van Dam has a great reputation in the field and has many acolytes in business and academia. (van Dam is coy about it, but it is often cited that the character named Andy in Toy Story was a tribute to van Dam.) Because of this association, Brown is probably better known for the more creative specialties of computer science, such as animation, user experience, graphics and design, but that’s not to say that you don’t receive excellent training in hard programming skills. Brown grads also are valued for their management/people skills and, let’s face, it’s hard to find people with both excellent training as programmers and with the ability to work on or lead a team. You’ll see all the major employers on campus interviewing–Google, Microsoft, facebook, et al.–and you actually may have a better shot at a job because the competition is little less fierce than it might be than at a place like Berkeley, where your competition may number in the hundreds for a single position.