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

[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.