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Need Help Selecting University

5 pointsalexchacha15 comments

I've been accepted into a few universities for computer science, they are:

  UC Merced
  UC Santa Cruz
  UC Riverside  
  CSUN

I'm not sure if I should trust school ratings or how to interpret them. I'm after a good computer science education, with the right foundation of theory and practical knowledge. I would value your opinions and advice as it pertains to these universities, I have to make my decision in the next couple of weeks.

At the moment I'm interested in a bachelors. I currently don't have any specialty in mind. However I have interests in the following areas:

  Computer Science
  Computer Engineering
  Game physics
  Robotics

I'm not sure if I would like to pursue a master's degree or just a bachelor's degree.

I'm unsure how employers will view degrees from these universities, compared to one another.

I'll be graduating, from high school soon and in the past I've done several courses on computer science, from edX and Udemy primarily.

Have you visited them? At some point, a place feeling right can trump any minor differences in the programs.

With stuff like this, I do my research, but then ultimately go with my gut. Some of the greatest lessons I learned in college were outside the classroom.

Keep cost in mind as well (especially if loans are going to be part of this). Unless you’re doing something very specific, the school on the diploma won’t matter much, as long as people have actually heard of it and it’s reputable.

I went to UCSC and ended up at Stripe and Google, and so I feel like I've done alright for myself, so I'd recommend there, but it's not like we can go back in time and I can go to UC Merced (it didn't even exist back then) instead and then see how my life turns out and compare. to be real, they're not UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford of MIT or anything, so I don't think they'll particularly stand out from each other, (CSU is a slightly lower rung than UCs) but I'm also not hiring fresh grads and aren't plugged into those rankings. Any out of state applications?

No one's going to care after a couple years in industry. As a proxy for quality, go for the most expensive one you can afford.

The only school of those I’ve heard about is Santa Cruz. But it can be difficult to get housing there as an undergrad and classes can be large.

Don’t optimize 100% for your degree and job. College is an opportunity to learn new things and have new experiences. I hire a lot of software engineers- being well rounded is a rare trait.

Find a school that you enjoy and suits your personality. You will be there for 4 years and you won’t just be studying the whole time.

When deciding where to do a PhD, I created a decision matrix out of the different things that I thought were important in considering my options, and how much weight to assign to each thing. So for different schools, important considerations might be location, activities, people who are there, academic rating, etc, where each of these are given a 1 to 10 weight for how important you think it is, and then each school is given a rating from 1 to 10 on on each of the factors based on how you perceive it to be.

Googling "decision matrix template google sheets" brings up many useful templates if my words are not clear.

If you do this in a spreadsheet you can then vary the different parameters and see how close (or not) your different choices are, based on what you think is important to you. Ive done this many times when making big decisions and it usually helps me to quantify what are usually otherwise vague and unclear notions.

I'm not a big connoisseur of college degrees, but there's really two things you can shop for brand recognition and good enough.

Personally, I don't think any of those schools have brand recognition in CS. So if you're considering them, you're just looking for good enough ... will they provide a good enough education for you to rise to your potential.

The overall UC/CSU has a reasonable reputation, so I suspect any school in either system will be good enough if you put in the work.

I don't know if there's much differentiation between the schools in terms of class size and student body size, but that can be a big deal.

As others said, look into housing availability and affordability. I would also add, condider the climate: IMHO Santa Cruz is going to be more pleasant than Riverside, but other people have different ideas than me.

I'm going to assume you're not in California. There's a huge prestige gap between all the CSUs except for Cal Poly SLO and the UCs, and there's a big prestige gap at the low end of the UCs, with Merced being a gamble on it getting its footing at some point, and Riverside being (until the introduction of Merced) the least prestigious UC.

UC Santa Cruz wins the prestige discussion hands down: ever since Cloudflare, they've been an A-list program.

I mean, unremarkable UC vs unremarkable CSU seems like kind of iffy; yeah unremarkable UC is better, but not better enough to make it a strong decision criteria, IMHO. But if you say UC Santa Cruz is well-known, then there you go. That's got some prestige, but probably not a school you would consider if you were applying to schools with prestige as your big criteria, which was more of my point.

It's not iffy, at all. The CSUs (except Cal Poly) are small, largely commuter schools, predominantly filled with students who otherwise wouldn't be going to college. No one's traveling from out of state to attend a CSU.

In contrast, the UCs range from "notable mid-size university", comparable to the most prestigious state schools in any other state on the low end with UC Riverside, to "top 10 universities in the world"-type institutions on the high end with Berkeley and Santa Cruz. People absolutely travel from not just all over the country, but all over the globe, to attend UCs.

Do US universities admit to specific undergrad programs these days?

I had met a guy who got his master's in Robotics from UC Santa Cruz. He was looking for a job at the time and I referred him to someone I knew who was looking to hire. I think he got an offer pretty quickly.

My observation is that you will make the biggest difference in your education. You will get out what you put in unless you are gifted.

Next difference is in-school opportunities, but this might be less important for a BS CS versus physics.

Don't ignore your non degree interests. They can make college life much better.

When you do have a speciality in mind, find professors whose research excites you. I know there is not much time, but maybe figure out a general direction at least.

Work backwards: which companies do you want to work at? Where are they located? And do they have connections to the local universities?

These universities are all more-or-less on the same level, reputation-wise, so it's not like you'll lose out significantly by picking one over another. (As would be the case if you were comparing Stanford to a random state school.)

I think the ROI on college for CS people has changed significantly in the past few decades. Costs have gone way up while future value seems to be trending down (due to AI + proliferation of CS degrees).

Furthermore, my experience in industry has been that nobody cares about your school after your first job or internship.

So if I were you I'd eliminate options with any red-flags, choose the cheapest option that remains, and then work my tail off to extract as much value as possible (read Cal Newport's "How to Win at College" to start).

A few very good programmers I know went to UC Santa Cruz, they seemed to enjoy it.

Which majors have you gotten into for each?

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