Engineering at a Liberal Arts School...

Corbett
Sun, 07 May 2006 02:15:46 +0000

Allegheny is actually a good small college; not a big name but comparable in selectivity to many large public universities, like Penn State for example. And they appear to be more serious about computer science than most liberal arts colleges. They have majors in Computer Science, Applied Computing/Software Development, and Applied Computing/Management and Entrepreneurship; there is also an active ACM chapter. The faculty may be small, but they will work harder at undergraduate teaching than the faculty at a big research university. I’d definitely give Allegheny a chance.

Now if you really want to do “Computer Engineering”, as opposed to “Computer Science”, Allegheny may not be ideal, because Allegheny (like most LACs) doesn’t have an engineering program. However, Allegheny offers [3/2 engineering programs](http://www.alleg.edu/accel/international/studies/options.php#engineering) with several highly-regarded engineering schools: Columbia, Duke, Case Western, Pitt, and WUSTL. If you do well in your first three years at Allegheny, you can transfer to one of these schools for two more years. After five years, you would get two bachelor’s degrees: a liberal arts degree from Allegheny plus an engineering degree from the engineering school.