Hi everyone! I’m a CS major at Yale. My friends and I get asked quite often about what it is like to study Computer Science here, and we realized that we ourselves asked a lot of the same questions back when we were deciding where to attend college. While information exists on the web, it’s spread out over a ton of different places and is difficult for people to quickly synthesize together. We decided to compile a (not-so) short summary in Q&A form of the different aspects of studying Computer Science here, with reference to facts and links to other websites wherever possible. While we’ll probably publish a more polished version somewhere else, here’s a more hastily put together version which we hope might inform and guide any future high schoolers who chance upon this thread:
What are the academic requirements like for a potential CS major?
•The philosophy of undergrad education at Yale is broadly similar to that of Harvard, Princeton and the like, and emphasizes intellectual exploration. Each student needs to take 36 term courses in their 4 years, which includes various distributional requirements, as well as around 10-14 courses in a major of your choice.
Unlike most schools, the major you indicate on your application is not binding in any way, and you’re free to shop around for different classes or take courses in different subjects before you decide on a major.
The CS major itself requires either 12 courses for the more common B.S. degree or 10 for a B.A., excluding any introductory programming courses or math classes like Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus. You can find more details here: http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/computer-science/#text
•To make the choice more complicated, there are also:
oCombined Majors: CS & Math, EECS, CS & Psychology, and Computing & the Arts. These majors require a mix of CS courses and the other subject, and are great for anyone looking to combine their interest in both fields.
oCombined BS/MS: If you’re a CS whiz, you could also graduate with a Masters in 4 years. The number of courses you’ll need to take are still the same, but you’ll need to take the graduate level versions of the courses instead.
oDouble majors: As the name suggests, this just means completing the requirements for 2 majors. Your overall workload may not increase, but you’ll have less freedom in deciding what courses to take. The most common double major combo seems to be CS and Economics, but I have friends who are CS and History, CS and Physics, as well as CS and Music majors, among others.
What is the faculty like?
•Yale’s CS Department (http://seas.yale.edu/faculty-research/faculty-directory?tid=148&keys=) started off as an offshoot of the Math department (with Alan Perling, the world’s first Turing Award laureate as its first chair), and is now part of the Engineering School. In terms of size it’s smaller than the big CS schools (think MIT or CMU), but on a per-person basis it’s pretty much on par with any top-10 school.
The faculty includes 6 ACM Fellows (Avi Silberschatz, Dan Spielman, Joan Feigenbaum, Holly Rushmeier, Dragomir Radev and Michael Fischer), Godel, Polya and Nevanlinna Prize winners, 1 MacArthur Fellow, and 2 National Academy of Science members (Ronald Coifman and Vladimir Rokhlin), among others. They have a whole host of interesting and groundbreaking research between them - for instance, Steven Zucker’s work on Computational Vision or Julie Dorsey’s papers on computer graphics and architecture. Faculty members have their own research websites, so if you’re interested we’d encourage you to check them out.
The department is currently on a hiring spree, funded by a few multi-million dollar donations as well as increased funding from the school. People who’ve joined in recent years include professors from Cornell (Rajit Manohar), U Mich (Dragomir Radev), as well as Mahesh Balakrishnan (from Microsoft Research), Minlan Yu (from USC) and Mariana Raykova (from SRI). In addition, as part of the expansion of the Department of Data Science (http://news.yale.edu/2017/03/06/introducing-ds2-future-data-science-yale), there should be about 9 more faculty members joining over the next few years, the first of whom has already been announced – John Lafferty, who founded the world’s first machine learning department at CMU.
Ultimately however, we’ve seen too many college decisions hinge on things like department rankings or research output, when in reality these rankings are affected mostly by the size of the department and have almost no relationship with teaching quality. The professors at all top 50 schools have PhDs from the same few institutions, and virtually all of them should be knowledgeable enough to teach undergraduate systems programming and the like.
What is the curriculum like? How are CS classes taught?
•The core sequence for the CS Major hasn’t changed much over the years and focuses quite resolutely on the fundamentals of computer science. Like most of its peer schools, Yale believes that computing technologies constantly change, but the underlying fundamentals don’t. I think the views of faculty members can best be described in this blog post by Joel Spolsky (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-javaschools-2/) . Here’s an excerpt:
“I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can’t pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java, but try explaining that to the average HR drone.
But what about the CS mission of CS departments? They’re not vocational schools! It shouldn’t be their job to train people to work in industry. That’s for community colleges and government retraining programs for displaced workers, they will tell you. They’re supposed to be giving students the fundamental tools to live their lives, not preparing them for their first weeks on the job. Right?
Still. CS is proofs (recursion), algorithms (recursion), languages (lambda calculus), operating systems (pointers), compilers (lambda calculus) — and so the bottom line is that a Java School that won’t teach C and won’t teach Scheme is not really teaching computer science, either. As useless as the concept of function currying may be to the real world, it’s obviously a prereq for CS grad school.”
That said, Yale has also slowly realized that there is a niche for programming and ‘applied’ courses, which is why the last few years have seen courses like ‘Software Engineering’ , ‘Designing the Digital Economy’ and ‘Apps, Programming and Entrepreneurship’ being introduced.
Most lower division classes are held in the common lecture-tutorial format, while the more advanced courses are often smaller and more intimate - I’ve often found myself being one of just 5-7 people in a class. The ‘Zoo’, or the undergrad CS Lab is our preferred hangout spot, and you’ll always find someone or the other there that is willing to help you debug your programs or brainstorm ideas. The university is also currently building a new underground concourse for CS, which should be completed this fall.
What CS activities are there outside class?
•Engineering and CS activities have grown rapidly in our time here. The Yale Computer Society (http://yalecompsociety.org/) is the biggest CS group and organizes talks, competitions, study sessions and Pizza parties. Recent people they’ve invited include Tom Lehman (founder of Genius), Daniel Friedman (CEO of Thinkful) as well as several FB engineers. YHack (http://2016.yhack.org/) is Yale’s biggest annual hackathon, and sponsors have included Two Sigma, Intuit, GE, Nasdaq and Symantec. The Yale Center for Research Computing on West Campus holds programming boot camps (http://research.computing.yale.edu/news-events) and conferences throughout the year.
•The Center for Engineering Innovation & Design (CEID) has a ton of money that it spends on engineering and tech events (http://ceid.yale.edu/calendar/#calendar-widget), fellowships, as well as workspaces for people to work on their projects. It recently received a $20 million donation from James Tyler to support its programs for life.
•For any budding startup founders out there, the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (http://yei.yale.edu/) has been growing over the years. It funds a group of fellows each year and also links up people with prominent Yale alumni for help in venture capital funding, branding, legal and IP issues, etc.
•Other groups we’re not too familiar with include FloatYale ( a society for women and other gender minorities in CS), Bulldogs Racing, Yale Intelligent Vehicles and the Yale Aerospace Association (http://yaleaerospace.com/). There’s also a ton of smaller hackathons and tech events that happen throughout the year by various bodies like Schools of Medicine, Forestry and Management, which anyone is free to attend.
•Funded research opportunities are really abundant (http://science.yalecollege.yale.edu/yale-science-engineering-research/fellowship-grants), and most professors are willing to take on students under their wing as long as you show some initiative and curiosity. Undergrad research in CS is as not as common as in the natural sciences because most students prefer industry internships, but there are interesting opportunities in the Institute for Network Science, School of Medicine, West Campus, Social Robotics Lab, GRAB Lab, Computer Graphics Lab, Systems Lab, and others.
Where do freshly-minted grads end up?
•The upside of being a CS major is that the market for programming skills is pretty hot right now. Virtually every CS Major we know at Yale who wanted a tech job got one. According to Yale’s career reports: http://ocs.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/OCS%20Stats%20pages/Public%20-%20Final%20Class%20of%202016%20Report%20(6%20months).pdf, 11.2% of all grads entered the technology sector, and 3 of the top 12 employers of Yale Seniors are Google, Facebook and Microsoft (page 4).
Virtually all major tech companies either recruit on campus at Yale, or have some form of recruiting pipeline, and so do several Boston/NYC region startups. We anecdotally know Yalies at Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pixar, DE Shaw Research, MongoDB, NASA and others. Luckily the Yale ‘brand’ is worth something, and it’s not too difficult to get interviews by simply sending resumes to companies that are hiring. Several other CS majors also choose to work in management consulting or finance.
•We don’t really have concrete data on CS grad school admissions yet, but we do personally know recent graduates heading to PhD programs at Columbia, UC Berkeley and Stanford. Yale alumni have traditionally been disproportionately well represented among faculty members in the top 50 CS departments (http://drafty.cs.brown.edu/professors/), especially considering the small cohort size each year. This study in Science Advances corroborates that, ranking Yale 9th in CS in terms of prestige based on faculty hiring networks (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005/tab-figures-data).
•A few people go on to found startups themselves each year. Entrepreneurial success isn’t particularly related to which university you went to, but going to Yale doesn’t exactly harm your ability to get funding[1]. Famous startups by Yale alumni include Electronic Arts, 23AndMe, Stack Overflow, Pinterest, and Genius.
[1]See: http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/alma-mater-data/ or https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236912. Yale would probably rank much higher if you take into account the size of its student body which is about 60% the size of Harvard or 25% the size of Berkeley
We realize we’ve provided a lot of facts till now, but honestly the best part about attending Yale for us is the people we’ve met – curious, passionate, funny, warm and well-rounded – which can’t really be measured on any college ranking metric. It’s easy to get caught up in a numbers game, trying to compare different colleges on tons of measures, but we hope you don’t overlook the fact that attending college is also an experience in itself!
(If you have any other questions, feel free to post here! We don’t check this site too often,but we’ll try to give answers whenever possible)
Are they hiring anyone for AI? How would you rate the current undergrad summer internship placement? Do leading companies recruits undergrad on campus for summer and full time? Thanks for starting this thread, it is very useful.
What is the ratio of male to female in the CS departments for undergrad? Do you currently have enough diversity in the CS department as I hope it is not too Asian heavy. What about the faculty male to female ratio for CS department? Can you major in CS and minor in statistics? Any hing you can share will be appreciated, if the data is not available, I will understand.
Thank you so much for starting this thread, @reuynshard . I am often asked about Yale CS, where DS is a rising senior, because for many people it’s not an obvious choice. He has benefited greatly from the ready access to professors and research, and his internships aren’t chopped liver either. 
I’m probably outing myself (and my son) by posting this, but what the heck. My son graduated from Yale in 2015 and is a data scientist and project owner at Spotify. The group he’s in charge of is responsible for the entire user experience. Coding is a big part of his job, but data mining and statistical psychological prediction also comes into play. FWIW: Although he took a number of Yale CS classes, he graduated with a psychology degree.
Thanks @gibby, that is very helpful; since we need lots of need based aid for our daughter, and college admission is crap, this thread is awesome for kids like mine as they want to explore further their options…
@reuynshard or anyone, If a female student has already taken Linear Algebra and Multi variable Calculus while in high school, could they by pass these requirements and take further statistical course. Thanks
@infinityprep1234, I believe that bypassing classes is common, for males and females :). Iirc, DS didn’t take any calculus at Yale.
You asked previously about a statistics minor. Yale doesn’t have minors, but a CS and statistics double major is possible. It, and an MS/BS, do cut down on electives.
@IxnayBob we have some real unique issues with our kids, we have one daughter who attends on a very high need based scholarship to a elite prep school, her sister is joining her on similar scholarship to prep school too, Older daughter has done very well in school despite taking a very challenging course load, problem is being Asian and needing need based aid limits the number of school that she can apply and get admitted, Honestly we were thinking to send her back to Korea, for schooling and my husband has been against her attending prep school as financially it was not possible for us, but since then things have changed, we are also moving to NY this summer, so hopefully instate school will provide us a good back up plan. Please forgive my stupid questions as Yale is one of the school that is need blind for my daughter.
@infinityprep1234 , perhaps you should start a separate thread about your family circumstances. I think this thread is about Yale CS more generally.
This was the best source we could find: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/women-in-engineering-and-computer-science/2089/. It states that women earned 49% of engineering degrees at Yale and
13% of CS degrees. The CS number seems suspiciously low, and according to this list: http://cpsc.yale.edu/people/2016-2017-computer-science-degree-recipients, it’s closer to 30%. The under-representation of women in CS is probably a worldwide issue, and certainly not one that is limited to Yale.
There are no minors here, because the administration feels it discourages academic experimentation and draws people into a paper chase. However, one can always take lots of statistics classes outside the major, or choose to double major if one wants to delve deeper into both subjects. The ‘minor’ title is definitely not required to show employers you have some knowledge of statistical methods.
The major tech companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Palantir, etc.) all recruit on campus, either during career fairs, by posting on internal job boards, or by sponsoring events like Hacknights and Hackathons. Another way to get internships is by being referred/recommended by an existing Yale student or alum at the company, which is how I and a lot of my friends got their internships. Yale engineering students also have access to the engineering fair at Columbia, and lastly most companies also advertise their summer internship programs online.
Startups and tech firms don’t just visit Yale looking to hire CS talent, they also hire for generalist roles, and are often on the lookout for specific artistic, scientific, financial or legal expertise. If some of these firms also receive resumes from CS majors, they would be glad to take a second look at them. I can’t really compare career services at Yale with that of other universities, but it seems to work fine for most of us 
How much more difficult/challenging or time-consuming is the combined BS/MS is compared to the standard BS degree, and how common is this option among undergrads?
@ny23456, I think it depends. DS had taken most of the “undergrad” theoretical CS courses already, and since it’s his area of interest, would have take the “grad” courses anyway.
MS/BS (or MA/BA) approvals in some majors are very formal. DS reports that in CS it was a relatively informal process.
Does writing a common app essay related to CS improve chances of admission to Yale?