CS International Student

HydeSnark
Thu, 24 Dec 2015 02:51:19 +0000

Oy, this is like the third CS related thread in a few days.

One at a time:

The internship/job placement rate is very good according to our favorite senior lecturer. Chicago is actively recruited by tech companies. A bunch of UChicago alumni who work at google came in the middle of autumn quarter to talk to undergrads. Sadly I missed it so I have no idea what they said but I promise they know about us. There’s a CS jobboard you can look at: https://jobboard.cs.uchicago.edu/ And an events calendar filled with a ton of stuff: http://studentactivities.cs.uchicago.edu/page/event-calendar

Of my CS friends, there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful difference between international CS students and other CS students in terms of job prospects.

Yes, no intro CS class at UChicago requires previous programming experience. That said, the first day of 161, Honors CS, my professor asked who had prior programming experience and only two people didn’t raise their hands. They both dropped the class because it was too difficult. Prior programming experience will probably not help directly with Haskell (unless you have previous experience with functional languages in particular) but it will help you get an idea of whether you have can handle the workload of Honors CS. If you were successful at programming in the past you are more likely to be successful in Honors. I promise you can take it without knowing any programming, though, and I would encourage you to start in Honors and drop down if you think it’s too much. It is a fantastic class.

The 150s, non-Honors CS, are much more friendly to people with no prior programming experience but of the ones I knew, they still found the class to be very difficult. There are two sequences that are much more along the lines of traditional CS intro classes where you learn Java, Python, C, etc. (the 110s and 120s), and can ease into thinking like a programmer, but you will have to take the 150s or 160s to graduate with a CS degree.

There are RSOs focusing on startups, someone is hosting the University’s first Hackathon this spring, and there are plenty of people who are into startups and app development who you will probably be able to find just by casually talking to people in your CS class. There isn’t really a startup culture here and most CS majors are more interested in math than apps but you can find them if you look hard enough.