I went to a major US research institution and double degreed in CS and East Asian Studies (Japanese, basically). The quality of the Japanese program was life-changing for me. The quality of the CS program -- meh, I'm not unhappy with it, but neither the instruction nor the brand name was worth substantially more than the equivalent degree from a less prestigious institution.
Sevenish-years later I can guarantee you that no one who I do business with cares a lick about the name of my university. They don't ask, I don't tell. (Same with GPA, major, and specific wording of the degree, by the way. My professors and advisors carried on as if these were really important when I was in school. I actually cried when some minor academic rule looked like it was going to knock my degree from $ARBITRARY_LETTERS to $EQUALLY_ARBITRARY_LETTERS. I strongly suggest college kids have a professional mentor outside of academia in whatever industry/culture/etc they want to seek employment in, so you can figure out whether the things academia are so obsessed with actually matter at all.)
This is, obviously, influenced by my career choices. If I had done what many kids at my university did and gone into investment banking, management consulting, or the like, I would have a 4x scale replica of my diploma made so that one could not help reading the name when one entered my office.
Whoopsie. I just remembered that the YC application actually does ask for university, GPA, and major. I won't speak for pg and the gang, but I strongly suspect that these exhibit an exponential decay in saliency the longer you have been out of school.
(i.e. if you're still in school, maybe getting good grades at a good school is a useful proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff, but if you have been out of school for seven years, having done meaningful stuff is a much better proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff.)
After 7 years of work experience, certainly. But as students coming out right now can tell you, getting an entry level job is nigh impossible. Having the extra edge might be worth it.
The problem with CS is nobody really knows how to select students that are good at it or teach it. So there is little real difference between graduates of a top school and an average school with a few good instructors. As to networking, there are plenty of ways to network that don't cost 100,000$.
PS: Some schools still attract talent, but plenty of terrible programmers graduated from ex: MIT.
I do not attend MIT but I am a big fan of OCW videos and I still regret being rejected (probably will for life). I would love to be taught by Demaine, Leiserson et al.
I am not sure you can survive that rigorous a coursework and graduate with less-than-average skills in at least theory, systems, compilers / prog. languages (dunno if everyone there does other stuff like ML, Advanced theory courses etc).
1) Doing a fifth year Masters at the same University is a waste. It is better to go to a different school. You get to meet new people, get exposed to different perspectives, and perhaps even live in a different part of the country.
2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea.
3) Getting into a top-10 school is hard. If someone suggests the "transfer after 2-years" option, ask them for stats. Be aware of "self-selection" in that people who bother applying will likely have solid stats to begin with.
4) The key benefits of a top-10 school are networking/peers and the school's selectivity. When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO. You can get more complete information in books. If you are truly stuck with a concept, you can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you. Oh .. and don't forget about all those lectures online :-)
5) Not having a lot of school-related debt makes it less stressful to become a young entrepreneur.
6) If you did a solid but cheap undergrad program, doing a course-based Masters at a top school might be worth it.
7) If you want to go into academia, school matters. Top-20 is okay for undergrad. Top-10 (general or field specific) for grad is a must.
I haven't tried it. But I've seen it done, and more.
When I was a grad student at Berkeley, there was a computational biology class where another student (I'll call him SG) and I hung around afterwards to talk to the professor. I assumed that he, like me, was looking for an advisor. The reality was a bit different.
SG wasn't a student at all. He worked from home as a programmer doing boring stuff and lived an hour away. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he drove to Berkeley, snuck into the CS department by coasting behind someone else who left the door open, and went to the graduate classes he thought were interesting.
On day 1, SG asked the professor if he could sit in without formally registering for class. Sure, why not, the profs don't care about the administrivia. Halfway through the semester, SG explained his whole situation to the prof (and me, because I was waiting around too). How he was extremely motivated, hard working, and wanted to learn, and would work half-time for free indefinitely if someday there might be a job there for him. How could the prof say no?
Over the next few months, SG gets a lot done. A lot more than your average Berkeley grad student with no real-world software engineering experience. So when the prof next gets some grant money, it's a no-brainer to hire him full time. Suddenly SG has an interesting job and a great resume.
1) Doing a fifth year Masters at the same University is a waste. It is better to go to a different school.
...
2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea.
One caveat to those two - if you are not rich, and do get into a top 10 school, doing the fifth year Masters is very compelling, if only for the tuition you'd save + starting earning income a year earlier.
re: #1, I'd like to hear some Stanford kids' feelings on that. When I was managed developers and doing a lot of new college interviewing/hiring at Microsoft, I honestly can't remember a single candidate from Stanford who didn't elect to do the "BS+MS in Computer Science over 5 years" option.
> When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO.
i have to disagree. it's a pretty reasonable statement in intro and intermediate level classes, but in advanced classes, a lot of the material covered does not exist in textbooks yet. the info is possibly located in academic papers, or maybe the result of unpublished research. even if the information theoretically exist in papers, it is very nontrivial to find the papers (typically only universities have subscriptions to the journals they appear in), determine which ones to read (just because its published doesn't mean its good, or even true), and then assemble that into a reasonable narrative.
One thing that's frequently overlooked are the relationships you'll build at school. I went to a very solidly ranked state school (umd.edu), and most of the people I know got jobs at government contractors. I have friends I've met through jobs that went to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, and they have a bunch of connections at Google, Facebook, and other hot startups. Getting jobs through personal connections is way more effective than combing Internet ads or dealing with recruiters, and the jobs you'll be exposed to through friends seem to be way better at a top-tier school.
I was in a really good CS program at a top engineering school. I had great teachers, peers and courses. I had 2 years of real client experience when I walked out the door.
That's all well and good. What I learned at school was far more on the social side. I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to be more outgoing. I learned how to be comfortable with a large group of people. I did stupid things. I made life long friends. I made connections that continue to help me.
You have to learn this stuff in a trial by fire. College is good because it a) forces you into those trials by nature of the beast and b) is expected that you screw up a few times in your college years.
I think more than a "big-name" university, it is important to go to a university with a great course structure (which most "big-name" universities do have). I've often looked at courses at MIT, Stanford, CMU etc and said "I wish this course was offered at my school" or "I wish this course was structured like this at my school".
The one way an education at a "big name" university has helped me is that people trust me more. I moved from academia (astronomy) to software engineering and I have no formal qualifications (or training) in what I do for a living. But once people hear where I went they assume the best. I have noticed this several times.
In retrospect I find the way that class and education are linked to be terrible (you could pretty much divide the place up into rich people and smart people, with only a small intersection), but it wasn't a bad experience.
If you want to program in the industry, the name on your degree doesn't help you much. I couldn't justify paying for the big-name private university that accepted me, so I got a BS in CS from The College of New Jersey, and have since been fortunate enough to work at Google. I also paid off my student loans within 10 months of graduation. If you go this route, and do extra work on the side, you might get the same education you could at a top university. But you will have no help. A difference I didn't appreciate when I was 17 is the support structure a big-name university provides. They already have contacts everywhere, plus you're more likely to be surrounded with self-starters and high-energy workers. If you need help, you might get it.
But if you want to work at a top research university, you might want to get the biggest name on your degree you can. I know a few PhDs who complain that degrees flow downhill - they feel they must get jobs in the industry, since they have degrees from second-tier schools. When they came to the USA, they viewed an economically-priced degree as the better deal. But there is a glut of people with degrees from top universities who are looking for research positions, so they believe theirs don't come up for consideration.
I agree with this. It largely depends on where you want to take your career. I don't have a CS degree from $BIG_NAME, never had to take out a loan, and am very happy with my career thus far.
If you want a top research position, yes, $BIG_NAME CS degree is almost required. If you want to work for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... It helps, but certainly isn't required. If you want to work for a startup or any other company, it doesn't matter at all.
What matters is that you know your shit. $BIG_COMPANY isn't going to turn you down because you don't have a CS degree from Stanford even though you wowed them with your knowledge. All they care about is that you are you smart and gets shit done. That doesn't come from a degree, that comes from you.
I live and work in London ; the only places where I've seen recruiters or job ads specifically ask for a 'red brick' or 'top ten' university degrees is the financial domain. They specifically ask and check for a top ten university in order to hire you for most jobs, be it analyst or IT consultant. I would also argue that the pay scales you get there reflect this.
Most startups I've seen, again in London, dont really care where you are coming from. I used to work with one which basically said 'we dont care how you look or where you finished uni or even if you did, we just want you to be a) hard working b) smart working c) eager to learn'. Worked very good for them as they are now a successful business and most people have stuck around for years. I now work in a "top 3" uni in central London and we also dont care where yo u got your degree from. Our job ads are, by law, neutral - we are not able to distinct between candidates based on university alone. Again, works fine for us. It doesn't matter where you went, it only matters what you are. At the end of the day, I myself did not finish a 'big name' university,far from it, and its worked out well for me.
I'm doing my MSc at potentially the same "top 3" uni in central London, after getting my undergraduate from a school much lower on the league tables. The biggest thing I've noticed, not considering any sort of academic rigor/quality differences, is the amount of on campus recruiting and outreach from big name employers in finance and engineering.
It seems like there's someone on campus from DB, Barclays Capital, EY, Lehman, etc, everyday for the first month or so of the year. There's also things like opportunities to apply for McLaren racing sent from the department office -- things like that didn't exist at my old uni. It's not necessarily the case that these things would be unattainable, but you're much more aware of these opportunities at big name schools.
The biggest boon comes if you're interested in entering the financial sector, or if you're really set on following the whole "graduate scheme" path. But like you suggest, it doesn't really matter outside of that.
It's also a means to filter out the hundreds of CVs, many of which will be sent "on spec", from people who just send a CV to every job ad, down to a level at which someone can actually read them.
Certainly it is the case that once upon a time, any degree was a "leg up" in your career, back when only 10% of school leavers went. Nowadays, that the last government set out to get 50% of school leavers into college, only Russell Group degrees still have that advantage - everywhere else adds little to your prospects above good A-levels.
As a graduate from a "big name" university I would say I am a little biased but honestly it depends on a few things but ultimately comes down to one principle: You will get out of school what you want.
In that I mean, there are people who go to "big name" schools and make ZERO connections and take off after 4 years wondering why they took on 100k in debt. Then there are people who go to small schools (like my wife) who meet lots of great people in their field who eventually will be a great resource for them (eg, my wife now works at Google). She has zero debt and works beside graduates of top schools from around the country.
Now personally, I think that she is the exception and not the rule. The biggest advantage of going to a big name school is that it lets you get your foot in the door. You never have to "hide" the fact that you went to a small school, and there will inevitably be times that you fill out an application and wish that you could put down Stanford/MIT/Univ. of Michigan
Good luck in your decision. Remember that you will probably adjust your career path during college and that a school that offers an overall brilliant student body and faculty will only help you down the road.
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Sevenish-years later I can guarantee you that no one who I do business with cares a lick about the name of my university. They don't ask, I don't tell. (Same with GPA, major, and specific wording of the degree, by the way. My professors and advisors carried on as if these were really important when I was in school. I actually cried when some minor academic rule looked like it was going to knock my degree from $ARBITRARY_LETTERS to $EQUALLY_ARBITRARY_LETTERS. I strongly suggest college kids have a professional mentor outside of academia in whatever industry/culture/etc they want to seek employment in, so you can figure out whether the things academia are so obsessed with actually matter at all.)
This is, obviously, influenced by my career choices. If I had done what many kids at my university did and gone into investment banking, management consulting, or the like, I would have a 4x scale replica of my diploma made so that one could not help reading the name when one entered my office.
(i.e. if you're still in school, maybe getting good grades at a good school is a useful proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff, but if you have been out of school for seven years, having done meaningful stuff is a much better proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff.)
PS: Some schools still attract talent, but plenty of terrible programmers graduated from ex: MIT.
I am not sure you can survive that rigorous a coursework and graduate with less-than-average skills in at least theory, systems, compilers / prog. languages (dunno if everyone there does other stuff like ML, Advanced theory courses etc).
1) Doing a fifth year Masters at the same University is a waste. It is better to go to a different school. You get to meet new people, get exposed to different perspectives, and perhaps even live in a different part of the country.
2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea.
3) Getting into a top-10 school is hard. If someone suggests the "transfer after 2-years" option, ask them for stats. Be aware of "self-selection" in that people who bother applying will likely have solid stats to begin with.
4) The key benefits of a top-10 school are networking/peers and the school's selectivity. When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO. You can get more complete information in books. If you are truly stuck with a concept, you can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you. Oh .. and don't forget about all those lectures online :-)
5) Not having a lot of school-related debt makes it less stressful to become a young entrepreneur.
6) If you did a solid but cheap undergrad program, doing a course-based Masters at a top school might be worth it.
7) If you want to go into academia, school matters. Top-20 is okay for undergrad. Top-10 (general or field specific) for grad is a must.
Really. You've tried this? Because grad students and professors aren't busy at all...
When I was a grad student at Berkeley, there was a computational biology class where another student (I'll call him SG) and I hung around afterwards to talk to the professor. I assumed that he, like me, was looking for an advisor. The reality was a bit different.
SG wasn't a student at all. He worked from home as a programmer doing boring stuff and lived an hour away. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he drove to Berkeley, snuck into the CS department by coasting behind someone else who left the door open, and went to the graduate classes he thought were interesting.
On day 1, SG asked the professor if he could sit in without formally registering for class. Sure, why not, the profs don't care about the administrivia. Halfway through the semester, SG explained his whole situation to the prof (and me, because I was waiting around too). How he was extremely motivated, hard working, and wanted to learn, and would work half-time for free indefinitely if someday there might be a job there for him. How could the prof say no?
Over the next few months, SG gets a lot done. A lot more than your average Berkeley grad student with no real-world software engineering experience. So when the prof next gets some grant money, it's a no-brainer to hire him full time. Suddenly SG has an interesting job and a great resume.
You can do a lot just with persistence....
...
2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea.
One caveat to those two - if you are not rich, and do get into a top 10 school, doing the fifth year Masters is very compelling, if only for the tuition you'd save + starting earning income a year earlier.
> When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO.
i have to disagree. it's a pretty reasonable statement in intro and intermediate level classes, but in advanced classes, a lot of the material covered does not exist in textbooks yet. the info is possibly located in academic papers, or maybe the result of unpublished research. even if the information theoretically exist in papers, it is very nontrivial to find the papers (typically only universities have subscriptions to the journals they appear in), determine which ones to read (just because its published doesn't mean its good, or even true), and then assemble that into a reasonable narrative.
Deleted Comment
I was in a really good CS program at a top engineering school. I had great teachers, peers and courses. I had 2 years of real client experience when I walked out the door.
That's all well and good. What I learned at school was far more on the social side. I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to be more outgoing. I learned how to be comfortable with a large group of people. I did stupid things. I made life long friends. I made connections that continue to help me.
You have to learn this stuff in a trial by fire. College is good because it a) forces you into those trials by nature of the beast and b) is expected that you screw up a few times in your college years.
Difficult to imagine a practical way to do this? Congrats, you've stumbled on what's wrong with higher education in the US today!
In retrospect I find the way that class and education are linked to be terrible (you could pretty much divide the place up into rich people and smart people, with only a small intersection), but it wasn't a bad experience.
If you want to program in the industry, the name on your degree doesn't help you much. I couldn't justify paying for the big-name private university that accepted me, so I got a BS in CS from The College of New Jersey, and have since been fortunate enough to work at Google. I also paid off my student loans within 10 months of graduation. If you go this route, and do extra work on the side, you might get the same education you could at a top university. But you will have no help. A difference I didn't appreciate when I was 17 is the support structure a big-name university provides. They already have contacts everywhere, plus you're more likely to be surrounded with self-starters and high-energy workers. If you need help, you might get it.
But if you want to work at a top research university, you might want to get the biggest name on your degree you can. I know a few PhDs who complain that degrees flow downhill - they feel they must get jobs in the industry, since they have degrees from second-tier schools. When they came to the USA, they viewed an economically-priced degree as the better deal. But there is a glut of people with degrees from top universities who are looking for research positions, so they believe theirs don't come up for consideration.
If you want a top research position, yes, $BIG_NAME CS degree is almost required. If you want to work for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... It helps, but certainly isn't required. If you want to work for a startup or any other company, it doesn't matter at all.
What matters is that you know your shit. $BIG_COMPANY isn't going to turn you down because you don't have a CS degree from Stanford even though you wowed them with your knowledge. All they care about is that you are you smart and gets shit done. That doesn't come from a degree, that comes from you.
I live and work in London ; the only places where I've seen recruiters or job ads specifically ask for a 'red brick' or 'top ten' university degrees is the financial domain. They specifically ask and check for a top ten university in order to hire you for most jobs, be it analyst or IT consultant. I would also argue that the pay scales you get there reflect this.
Most startups I've seen, again in London, dont really care where you are coming from. I used to work with one which basically said 'we dont care how you look or where you finished uni or even if you did, we just want you to be a) hard working b) smart working c) eager to learn'. Worked very good for them as they are now a successful business and most people have stuck around for years. I now work in a "top 3" uni in central London and we also dont care where yo u got your degree from. Our job ads are, by law, neutral - we are not able to distinct between candidates based on university alone. Again, works fine for us. It doesn't matter where you went, it only matters what you are. At the end of the day, I myself did not finish a 'big name' university,far from it, and its worked out well for me.
(I'm not a lawyer; but I have had training in the legal aspects of hiring and I run a job board)
It seems like there's someone on campus from DB, Barclays Capital, EY, Lehman, etc, everyday for the first month or so of the year. There's also things like opportunities to apply for McLaren racing sent from the department office -- things like that didn't exist at my old uni. It's not necessarily the case that these things would be unattainable, but you're much more aware of these opportunities at big name schools.
The biggest boon comes if you're interested in entering the financial sector, or if you're really set on following the whole "graduate scheme" path. But like you suggest, it doesn't really matter outside of that.
Certainly it is the case that once upon a time, any degree was a "leg up" in your career, back when only 10% of school leavers went. Nowadays, that the last government set out to get 50% of school leavers into college, only Russell Group degrees still have that advantage - everywhere else adds little to your prospects above good A-levels.
In that I mean, there are people who go to "big name" schools and make ZERO connections and take off after 4 years wondering why they took on 100k in debt. Then there are people who go to small schools (like my wife) who meet lots of great people in their field who eventually will be a great resource for them (eg, my wife now works at Google). She has zero debt and works beside graduates of top schools from around the country.
Now personally, I think that she is the exception and not the rule. The biggest advantage of going to a big name school is that it lets you get your foot in the door. You never have to "hide" the fact that you went to a small school, and there will inevitably be times that you fill out an application and wish that you could put down Stanford/MIT/Univ. of Michigan
Good luck in your decision. Remember that you will probably adjust your career path during college and that a school that offers an overall brilliant student body and faculty will only help you down the road.