Tell me what college to transfer to. (Or, Decloaking, part 2)

[kpreid]

As I wrote before, I am currently attending MVCC, a two-year college, and need to choose a college to transfer to (for a bachelor’s in computer science).

So, tell me what college(s) I ought to consider.

(I have of course also heard the advice that it doesn’t matter that much, but I've got to choose from some short-list...)

I am willing to consider any location in the contiguous US, but have been looking mostly at New York choices as a way to make the research list manageably short.

I am not looking for vocational training; I can learn this year’s or last year’s hot technologies just fine by myself, thank you. I’m looking for general education (“well-rounding”, shall we say), useful theory, and practice in thinking. I wish to avoid a high-pressure or competitive academic environment. Also, at MVCC, I have greatly appreciated the instructors’ approachability, availability, and even willingness to acknowledge mistakes.

Outside of education, I am particularly interested in there being social opportunities for the socially awkward; chances to talk to like-minded people (i.e. total geeks), and opportunities to talk to unlike-minded people (for the practice!).

Please give me your recommendations. Just a name, your personal experience, comments on others’ recommendations, whatever info you’d like to share.

(On the other hand entirely, I’d also consider going directly from MVCC to a full-time job given the right opportunity. This will be the topic of an upcoming post.)

Comments

[darius.livejournal.com]

It's been a couple decades since I went to Caltech. It's not New York and maybe short on opportunities to talk to unlike-minded people; high-pressure though not so competitive, it seemed to me. I can introduce you to a CS instructor there, mvanier (though he's busy this week).

[(Anonymous)]

I just arrived at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few weeks ago, and couldn't be happier.

Our ECE/CS departments are top-notch, too.

-- Jeff Wheeler

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

Portland State University (http://cs.pdx.edu/) (Portland, Oregon) has an excellently well-rounded program and a lot of good professors. If you're interested in pursuing Haskell (I came here from Planet Haskell) PSU has a number of folks who're interested in it and similar languages. Mark Jones (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/) (of Hugs and House (http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/) fame), Tim Sheard (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/) (of Omega fame), Andrew Tolmach (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~apt/) and Sergio Antoy (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~antoy/) (of Curry fame) are all there. Honestly, for Haskell goodies it's probably the best place outside of the UK. Also Jim Hein (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~jhein/) is an excellent teacher of discrete mathematics and automata theory (though now he's emeritus so I'm not sure how much longer he'll be teaching). They also have some strong folks in machine learning, operating systems, algorithms, etc.

In terms of orientation, they're more vocationally oriented than research oriented, but they're more about teaching the necessary basic skills than in teaching what's the hottest thing at the moment. Also, PSU has hands-down the best tech support (https://www.cat.pdx.edu/) I've seen at any college I've been to. In addition to official classes, you can volunteer for the braindump (http://www.cat.pdx.edu/bd.html) and learn all the practical stuff that no class will teach (from bash scripting, to the guts of X11, to networking hardware, and beyond).

And Portland itself is a wonderful city with all manner of subcultures and room for geeks to play about. In fact it's a sort of mecca for many stripes of geek. I could go on at great length, but I'll spare you ;)

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

From what I've seen Indiana State at Bloomington has a pretty good program too, though they're more Scheme based. Of course I've only just gotten here this semester and I'm focusing more over in cognitive science and computational linguistics, though lindseykuper is teaching the undergrad PL course and she'd be able to tell you more. So far I love it here, but as I said I've only just gotten here (and I'm seeing everything through PhD glasses anyways).

In terms of negative advice, I would not recommend Johns Hopkins right now. The CS department is a bit unbalanced and so it won't give a really solid background (and the PL side is particularly understaffed). Though if you're interested in statistical natural language processing, it is one of the best (if not the best) school for that. I wasn't really a fan of Baltimore, though some people love it.

Boston Area

[http://openid.aol.com/EdwardAllanKmett (from livejournal.com)]

The Boston Area here has a number of good CS programs.

There is MIT and Harvard obviously, but there are also particularly good programs at Northeastern (Mitchell Wand, Matthias Felleisen, Olin Shivers/Lots of PLT Schemers), Tufts (Norman Ramsey), and Boston University (Hongwei Xi/ATS). Not that I intend to offend anyone by leaving them off of this list.

We also have the Boston Haskell User Group. ;)