<p>For example, how is the CS education that I’d get at a top private (MIT, let’s say) in comparison to a top state school (UVA in this case)? I realize that I will get more job offers being a MIT grad, but in simple terms of the education that I’d receive how would the MIT surpass the UVA CS?</p>
<p>MIT is a class of its own.
The classes you take will be the same, but the material will be packed in much more densely. You will cover a lot more in an MIT class than in your state school.</p>
<p>But this “extra” knowledge wont’ be as useful as you might think in terms of interviews and job offers.</p>
<p>As of now, I have little-to-no CS knowledge. If my ultimate goal is to create my own business, how would these two “tiers” of schools serve me?</p>
<p>They will serve you exactly the same. It’s going to be more about YOU, your motivation, your discipline, your desire, etc. to start your own business. The school you go to may provide you with connections you will find helpful in creating a business but that’s almost purely the luck of the draw.</p>
<p>Particularly in the case of CS, in my opinion, where you go to school does not matter that much. There are many CS graduates who don’t know the first thing about programming. You can find stories of how they failed job interviews miserably and could not write a simple for loop. What matters is how much effort you want to put into it and how badly you want to learn CS. Someone who goes to a random state school and has a passion for CS (learning new languages, taking on random projects, etc.) is going to know a lot more than someone who goes to MIT and is just looking for a piece of paper after four years.</p>
<p>Surpass? I don’t know. But take what PurdueEE said. He;s absolutely correct.
There are famous people from other schools too.
Somehow I thought that we are giving too much credits for top schools - although I and everyone else would absolutely love to attend one of them (if we weren’t) and to experience that.</p>
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<p>For most people (including myself), I would say this is true. However, there are two major benefits to being at MIT, Princeton, CMU, Berkeley for CS.</p>
<p>(1) Mostly everybody around you (yes the faculty, but mostly the students) has an exceptional level of passion and ability and you can learn a lot from just being around them. Also, there is a lot of funding so if you happen to be entrepreneurial, you can expect a higher level of monetary support and also talented people with whom you can start a business.</p>
<p>(2) If you happen to be truely top material (I would not consider myself in this category and am not not referring to merely val at HS or high SAT score/GPA) - think a future Alan Turing or MIT professor, you have research opportunities in Theory, etc. which cannot be found elsewhere. Otherwise, if you are very good but not exceptional, for example, you can get similar exposure at many places (large fish in small pond gets great opportunities; large pond has enough water for all the fish).</p>
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wow!!! :O…can you link me to one of those stories? how did they come out in the end?</p>
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I always have the gut feelings that the most well-known entrepreneurs are all from the top 10 schools in the nations: Harvard, Stanford for example-.-</p>
<p>Is it just the opportunity, or that they are exceptionally talent?</p>
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<p>I don’t go to a high-prestige school but I think it must be a combination of the two. Certainly there are absolutely brilliant people at second tier State U and private colleges but the best at these schools (at least from my observation) usually either find employment at a good company or attend graduate school at a top university. </p>
<p>IMHO, the environment is at least as big a player as talent in big-league entrepreneurship. Students at top schools likely to find talented and entrepreneurial peers, a highly theory oriented education, faculty who are willing to spin off corporations wiith students based off thier research (think of MIT Media Lab spinoffs like E-Ink), and networks with venture capitalists and angel investors (think of Rajeev Motwani @ Stanford). Harvard (which is not the absolutely best CS program) provides a lot of these benefits while lower tier schools with good computer science programs really don’t.</p>
<p>The most recent story I have heard was from talking with one of my friends. We were discussing job interviews in a general sense and I asked him how his company conducted interviews (he works at a small software company). He went on to briefly describe their interview process and I inquired as to what kind of questions he asked applicants. He gave me an example of some questions they ask, one of which was to write a program to compute the nth Fibonacci number. I quickly told him that was ridiculously easy and could solve it in a few lines with the golden ratio. He asked what I was talking about… which I found odd, and then wrote some pseudocode to explain it. He then informed me that not a single applicant had ever solved it like that and probably 1/3 or so could not solve it using recursion and a for loop.</p>
<p>Here’s an article to read: [Coding</a> Horror: Why Can’t Programmers… Program?](<a href=“http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html]Coding”>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html)</p>
<p>I wonder if the amount of CS majors/grads that can’t write code is due to the large amount of cheating/copying of code from their friends that goes on in CS departments?</p>
<p>I hated my C programming class because you 30 multiple choice questions per test (determining output of code, determining errors in code, etc) for the first 30 minutes of the test, then you had 45 minutes to write 3 or 4 programs on the fly (on paper). The tests were very difficult, but I learned a lot about programming.</p>
<p>BTW, my professor went to MIT, so the test were modeled after the ones he took there. </p>
<p>Disclosure, I’m not a CS major.</p>
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No doubt this contributes to the inability of CS majors to code. Often, projects are “group” assignments and one member completes the project for the group and the other member does not code at all. Cheating in the form of “looking up completed code online” also results in no learning. If the exams are basically only on definitions and involve little/no coding, then the student might well not know how to code. </p>
<p>Curricula are also quite dumbed down (esp at medicocre CS unis) and students have no clue how compilers work or what is functional programming, just knowing how to code simple structures in Java or worse yet, how to “fill in” template code given by the professor.</p>