What are the best colleges for computer science?

sakky
Wed, 20 Jul 2005 03:08:11 +0000

The first thing I would point out is that the vast majority of people don’t know what they are going to major in when they first step foot into college, and most don’t even know if they are going to go to graduate school at all, setting aside the question of what they will be doing while they’re in graduate school. Even those people who think they are going to major in X often times eventually decide to switch to Y. Hence, I think it’s a false assumption to make that somebody would just confidently know that they should be getting a BS in CS right from the get-go, and certainly not with enough confidence to turn down Harvard for a place like Illinois, or even CMU. What if you do that, and then later find out that you no longer want to major in CS? You’d probably be feeling pretty darn foolish for turning down Harvard.

Secondly, I’m not saying that the Harvard guy in question would take ALL the CS classes on the side. He would just be taking the CS classes that he believes would be helpful to him.

The fact is, even a CS graduate student who did CS in undergrad isn’t going to use all the things he studied in undergrad. There are going to be certain CS undergrad classes that, in retrospect, just turned out to be a big waste of time for him, because he ends up never using them ever again in his life. If you take an undergrad computer database course, and your future research has nothing to do with databases, then that was just a waste of time for you.

So take this hypothetical guy at Harvard who realizes that he now wants to get into CS graduate school. He could major in CS at Harvard. However, I am pointing out that he could also major in math at Harvard, and pick up whatever other CS background he would need on the side - perhaps not the point of getting a fullblown CS degree, but enough that he would be armed with what he needed to know to pass his qual’s and do the research that he wants to do.

My real point is that I don’t see what is so bad about going to Harvard, even for a student who wants to pursue CS graduate work. While Harvard’s CS department might not be the best, Harvard’s math department arguably is. So a Harvard student who’s truly worried about deficiencies in the Harvard CS department could just take more Harvard math courses. Or take CS courses at that ‘other’ school in town. Whether he ends up with a CS degree or a math degree is, at the end of the day, irrelevant. What really matters is whether he is has the tools to succeed in a CS graduate program. I don’t think this is going to be an issue for that Harvard guy, if he’s serious. As seen from all the Turing Award winners, plenty of people carve out monstrously successful careers in computer science academia armed with a math bachelor’s, but no CS bachelor’s.

What I’m really asking is, how bad could a CS education really be at Harvard? Not the CS department, but the overall CS education? With a math department as strong as it is, with a highly flexible cross-reg policy with that ‘other school’, I think that a Harvard student who wants to get into academic CS could prepare himself just fine.