<p>There are facts, which you can’t hide from. You can dance all you want, but here comes the cold facts.</p>
<p>1)SBU CSE has more faculty members, which implies more opportunities to conduct research in their labs, and we are still hiring 5 more faculty members, the goal is 100 strong faculty members.</p>
<p>2)SBU has the same amount, if not more(since we have a strong finance scene as well, and I can tell by my 11 internship offers)companies recruiting on campus for CSE students. From Google, to Microsoft, to Apple, Morgan Stanley, BOA, you name it, for the most part, we have it.</p>
<p>3)SBU has far more research opportunities, as you mentioned you yourself were employed in a prestigious national lab, only 4 exist. Aside from that, we(along with you) have a brand spanking new CSE building coming, we already constructed a state-of-the- art CEWIT building for our research, and we are building a new Advanced super computing institute from an anonymous grant(~$30-50 million was anonymous donated).</p>
<p>4)SBU CS has producted top notch graduates, and is as old as Stanford and other departments. From Stanford’s product, to the leader of ICANN, the list of alumni just does not end. </p>
<p>5)We have the largest enrollment of CS students in terms of public universities.</p>
<p>6)We kick ass when it comes to ACM competitions. We usually either win it outright, giving schools like Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and 67 others a run for their money, or we come 2nd, this implies are students in CSE for the most part are dangerously kick-ass.</p>
<p>7)Yes, SBU is a tough school, our suicide rate is a bit above average, and students are not generally happy because of the tough courseload and tough projects. The motto of our department is ‘We make you build things’, and building is not easy. Don’t expect to smile when you have a segmentation fault while building your own shell from scratch in C. This is life, and there are plenty of folks smiling and happy in the other colleges(i.e, Psychology majors, Sociology majors, etc).</p>
<p>8)SBU has top notch CSE faculty. The person above who posted, will be reading Steven Skienna’s book, algorithm design manual, when he prepares for his interview, that’s just one example.</p>
<p>8)SBU is ranked 16th in the nation according to Gourman, in the 40’s according to USWORLDNEWS, our USWN ranking should be increasing, since we are now hiring more and more MIT and CMU faculty members, our oldies retired which was why we dropped from our all time peak ranking of 22nd in the USA.</p>
<p>The fact is this, don’t downplay the department, and recognize and I am not downplaying UT-Austin, and know that it is a great school. Don’t formulate lies to make it appear as if we are a rag-tag department, when in reality in various groups we can kick your behind, and our alumni might end up as your boss.</p>
<p>Best,</p>