Poll: Universities for Aspiring Hacker?
In the United States, it is application season now for admission into universities and colleges. I wonder what would be good research universities to consider for a student who desires to found a Web-service start-up as soon as possible, just after or while double majoring in math and computer science. The poll choices exclude some "obvious" fine universities, but please mention those in comments to this post if you like.
63 comments
[ 11.2 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] thread* Carnegie Mellon
* Berkley
* MIT
* Stanford
* UIUC
* Wisconsin
If someone thinks s/he can get into Columbia or Brown, s/he has a shot at any of these.
I'm bias, but I'll tell you a bit about UIUC. We've got something called work life balance (pretty much every party scene imaginable: frat, hacker, LGBT, sober, etc). We're also a top five CS program, ranked as the #1 most wired college by PC Magazine (2008), and ranked a top 25 program for entrepreneurship education by Entrepreneur magazine. Feel free to pass my email along (in my profile) to whoever is applying to college. I've given advice to several HNers on what it's like to study CS at UIUC.
Of course, you have to get over the fact that you're in central Illinois.
EDIT: A few words about large versus small CS departments. Small CS departments tend to be much more traditional and suffer from a severe lack of systems. This means they usually are heavy on the theory and things like security and web application programing are limited or nonexistent. Large CS departments have more money, more professors, and more to offer in terms of subject area. Make sure you look at the course catalog from the last several years for each place.
Yes, that was intentional, because the universities you kindly mentioned are familiar as universities with strong CS departments. I appreciate your other comments about chances at Brown and Columbia relative to chances at the other universities, and especially the specifics about UIUC. (I've been to the campus. We live near a different Big Ten university.) I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
Sure. This NYTimes article is useful in that it gives you the raw numbers behind admissions to Columbia and Brown: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-few-more-col.... You can see they're brutally low.
I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
State universities get a bad rap because their public view not exciting. Some examples: in Iron Man Tony Stark was wearing an MIT sweatshirt and in Swordfish, Stanley Jobson was a graduate from CalTech. State universities will never be able to replicate that kind of effect, an effect which is very important to young people.
That being said, once you examine reality, state universities can be quite exciting. Here are some bullets for you (sorry it's from UIUC again, but it's the one I know the most about):
* Paypal's founder and two cofounders of YouTube went to UIUC.
* Awesome speakers pass through regularly (I saw Larry Wall last year, I saw Alan Kay a couple of days ago, and I'm planning to see Stephen Wolfram tomorrow).
* There are a lot of hacker-like places on campus. For example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented the first popular graphical web browser. There's also Wolfram Research with Mathematica and Wolfram alpha.
* The Department of Energy and private utilities are essentially dumping money into the Information Trust Institute for securing the powergrid. In fact, there's a conference next week with tons of interesting speakers on this topic.
* A $30,000 dollar prize (the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize) is awarded each year to the student who "has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways."
As someone who lives in Central Illinois, I'll take issue with your comment. While it's not quite the same as living in New York, there's a lot to like about living here. There's plenty of things to do, and you're only two hours away from either Chicago or St. Louis. Post-college, it's a great place to raise kids. The cost of living here is ridiculously low compared to places like California.
However, as a college student, depending on what you're into, you'll end up distributing your social time between frat parties, gatherings at a friend's apartment, campus bars, and Chambana bars (for those unfamiliar with the area, bars let you in at 19 years old). Note that half of those places are filled with frat dudes. Not too much diversity there.
In terms of academics, the isolation is a bit difficult as well. I can't tell you how many security conferences and user group meetings I've wanted to go to in the past year that are all in Chicago. Although for job related stuff, companies will usually fly you out from our airport, so at least you don't have to go to Midway or O'hare.
If interested, you should also check out VeloCity, a dorm for entrepreneurs: http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/
They also have an MBET master's program that lets you incubate an idea over 11 months and you get student volunteers. It's right in their technology park next to the RIM (Blackberry) global HQ, OpenText, Google Canada, etc.
O and should mention McMaster's MEEI program which also is a master's program/incubator combo.
DISCLAIMER: Once you get it going, you are better off finding round 1 financing in the Valley than anywhere else, as far as I am told.
- UBC
- McGill
- McMaster
- Queens *(<- Heard this school is really, really tough)
Don't go here:
- U of Toronto: This is a very UN-entrepreneurial school. Good reputation but trust me, you don't want to go there. It is just too theoretical and math based. I don't mean like studying RSA. I mean like solving the proofs behind every mathematical element of RSA, and proofs are sometimes multiple choice. Really, really only for those with a serious love of theoretical mathematics.
In reality, the most interesting people you would like to meet are neither your age nor at your school (truth is, most are probably long dead; that's where the books come handy, to make the communication of knowledge timeless.)
From your list I'd go with Rice, though the differences in the end may really come down to personality and chance (room mates, friends, profs, etc).
Atlanta doesn't have as big as a web entrepreneur presence as some cities, but it's easy to get started in a city that is significantly cheaper than most. There are regular meetups where local entrepreneurs get together and talk about what they need and how to make the city even better for technology startups.
A brand new coworking space has opened up: http://www.ignitionalley.com/ Setup in part by HN user timdorr
I'm a freshman here at umich. I considered many of those same schools above and was down to WashU and umich in the end. I chose here because the computer science department and engineering school in general is far better, and the size of the school means there are simply amazing resources available.
Even more so, entrepreneurship is HUGE on this campus. I'm doing a web startup right now, and the resources are unbelievable. There's a large community of student web startups ( > 15 in one startup founder group here), a big student entrepreneurship organization (MPowered) that among other things supports startups, and centers for entrepreneurship at both the business and engineering schools that support you with advice and help you get seed money.
As well, with it being a huge school with so many of its programs in the top 10, there's so much going on and so many random people you can talk to. My first few weeks of freshman year, I met with political science, engineering, and informatics professors to talk about my project to get some advice, and all were open to taking some of their time just to chat with a random freshman about his project.
If you want to hear more, send ME an email (NOSPAM == @) afeldman NOSPAM pamiproductions.com
EDIT: As well, being a big school, there of course is every social group imaginable around, and there are always people around who want to go have fun and others who want to work, and others who want to do both. I know it sounds like it above but I really, really love being here, especially as a web startup founder.
University won't make any difference in that specific goal and will probably slow it down because you'll have lots of classwork to do. In any event, the point of college is really to explore as much of yourself as you can and learn about ideas you would never have on your own. It's entirely likely that 4 years from now Web services will be passe and we'll have moved on to something else. Either that, or in college you'll find something you think is even cooler.
It's less and harder to come by for undergrads, but postgrads of all nationalities have a very strong chance of being fully funded.
Don't get me wrong, it's still tough, but no tougher than what I understand the life of a postgrad in the US is :)
Tech has a college of computing, which I think will be nice (especially compared to being thrown in w/ engineering and having to do all those extra required classes). And they have "threads" where you specialize in 2 aspects of CS (and you do 1 thread if you do computational media), which is cool.
Seriously though, we're completely separate from the engineers, have a brand new building (The Gates-Hillman Center), and all the professors are working on cool stuff all the time. It's worth the application fee (if there is one?)
The introductory cs couse, ie the one I'm in right now, is not very good. I assume it gets a lot better, but the ones teaching those courses are not exactly on the cutting edge of what cs is at the moment. Case in point, my professor likes to speak great volumes of how important UML is and how programmers can spend months just designing the UML before they get to any coding.
That said, research here is pretty good. Jeff Han, one of the main multi-touch developers, worked at NYU. He gave a TED presentation as well: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jeff_han_demos_his_breakth...
Also, it's New York City, so you have a good chance of meeting all kinds of people, not just students and professors. Google's office is only about a 20 minute walk from campus.
Also, it's expensive, very expensive.
http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/Catalogs/Ugrad/Current/cscourses.htm...
If you google "WPI csxxxx", you'll probably hit course websites for current and past courses, which give some insight in the syllabus and assigned work.
EDIT: List of course websites:
http://www.cs.wpi.edu/Undergraduate/coursepages.html
Essentially if you are considering NYC and don't want to graduate with nearly 100k in loans(which is likely at NYU/Columbia), want small class sizes and a chance to work with a tight nit group of hackers Pace is a good bet.
http://www.pace.edu/seidenberg/
Details on scholarship: http://www.pace.edu/page.cfm?doc_id=25567
As a side note, I know of at least one group of econ/math/cs students who are building a startup now. I'm not sure how smart it is to start it in the school year because the class schedule can be extremely rigorous, but to each his/her own.
P.S. I can't argue with the person pushing UIUC. They just won the ACM ICPC yesterday ;)
An engineering degree was the best choice I ever made (my particular field was electronics but I don't think it really matters) as it instantly gave me a lot of credibility and employability (my current employer met me for lunch to check I wasn't a psycho and hired on the spot).
This does have relevance to your question however: engineering taught me a lot about working hard on a project to get it up to scratch, iterative development, management (they taught us lots of management stuff - 60-70% of my peers went on into management post-grads.jobs), team work, presentations (SUCH and important skill).
It definitely prepped me better to run a startup than a CS degree would have. At the moment I am working on my startup idea at the same time as finishing up (well, 10 months left) a post graduate masters in CS from the Open University (distance learning; but the seriously top notch stuff). The end result should be maximum employability with solid experience AND CS training :D
It's not for everyone, and CS is a great choice too (if you pick a good one). But it's worth considering strongly as an option!
As I said I'm still "developing" this approach; in a few years we'll see how it really turns out!
EDIT: incidentally I think a really good Electronic Engineering degree can teach you a lot of great hacker skills. Skills like automatically wanting to look inside the "black box" to find out what your playing with come naturally to me where I know "pure CS" types sometimes lose track (the down side is I am shaky on some of the pure CS...)
Beyond that, there's a heavy emphasis on the nitty-gritty technical stuff like writing an operating system and implementing malloc and even buffer overflows. You really go all the way down to system architecture basics and all the way up to functional programming/algorithms/logic/etc. I think the breadth is very helpful in that it gives you a big "tool kit" for when you need to attack much more specific problems later in life.
With all due respect that is the kind of attitude I wouldnt expect in an Engineer (and possibly see in a CS graduate). It probably depends largely on the course.
I was taught5, in a very techncal way, how to approach a problem you have no experience in (in fact this was the third lecture of my first semester - and they ground it into use over the course of the following year). I'm perfectly happy being thrown ASP code (for example, never coded in ASP) and told to fix it because of that.
The system architecture stuff is what I am missing; and it's been a bit tough to catch that up. Luckily it;s not been essential so far but I can see where it might become a problem in the future.
At the end of the day I guess it comes down to which approach syncs more with you as an individual - and where you think you can gain the most help/skills.
The other mistake I made was transferring back home to the state school. I didn't want to go in debt from school, which was what I was about to do. I started at New Mexico Tech (which except for being in the middle of no where is an awesome hacker school imo, it should be on the list; they control the VLA on campus btw).
ErrantX: I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well (you mentioned you were an EE)
I imagine that might combine the best of both worlds; but that's just from the name :)
Computer Engineering (CE) also sometimes at some institutions goes by the name of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). My hunch is they are the one and the same.
I guess my degree was pushing into the CS arena and CE is pushing the other way.
The first of your link looks like a perfect course for me :D
However, I have heard it can be one of the toughest degrees to complete.
Sorry for the late reply.
Teach yourself the CS stuff (on the side) and find something that will really challenge you intellectually. Math is good, philosophy is good, the sciences are good (physics, biology).
Hacking is about being clever and adaptable, and knowing CS stuff helps a lot certainly, but more important is being smart (or knowing how to hack smartly).
CS is still a new knowledge, and as such it is in flux. Anything that you learn about it in college will most likely be different by the time you leave college...
So I guess my point is to learn how to learn and be interested in things (and think about them, hard), as that will take you farther than knowing a bunch of algorithms, or a specific hardware (you can learn the algorithms and hardware when you need them).
As much as I loved my time there, I'd have to say it's a pretty bad school for startups. MIT or Stanford are probably far better in terms of providing resources, a community, student support, etc.
The problem is that the administration is too busy to adopt new technologies, the engineering community is too tied into wall st, finance, consulting, etc., and the students are just sort of averse to supporting startups.
Fun fact though, CU Community, an early Facebook competitor, was actually building a strong following before Facebook even existed.
- UIUC has a pretty solid CS program, but it's cooold out there. - University of Michigan is solid too. - NYU isn't the best CS education, but the amazing location will open a lot of doors for you. - Columbia's CS program isn't that great. If you could get into Columbia, you might as well go to one of the top 5 CS programs instead. - My next door neighbor here at Berkeley went to Brown for his undergrad, and spoke highly of his education there.
Just my two cents :)
* Super amounts of academic freedom, drop/add anytime, take grad student courses, have keys to buildings, special access to CS professors both within UCSB CCS and UCSB at large, and more :)
Disclaimer: if I hadn't chosen Brown, I would have chosen UCSB CCS. UCSB would have been way more expensive for me than Washington University St. Louis, but if Brown hadn't been an option I would have chosen UCSB CCS. (In case it wasn't clear, I had a choice between the three places and also had visited them all)
Moving on to the electives: The most popular electives are offered maybe every semester, as a single course, but it is much more common to see electives given only one slot every year. The less popular (either for teaching or for students themselves; I'm not sure) electives are offered as rarely as once every two years, and they include things such as Intro to Database Systems, Unix Tools, or other things that seem like they should be offered more frequently.
A plus is that you can take graduate level courses as electives, and there are quite a few interesting topics offered there. If you're looking to do web development, currently there is a Googler-taught course on Ruby on Rails, but little choice in the way of others such as Django or PHP. Actually, the CS department intentionally gimps some of the more interesting courses, reducing them to having zero value towards the completion of your major. (Web Development is an overview course that happens to be one of them.)
That said, NYC is an amazing place to be, and I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else, even given a better CS department. As well, you have the option of the Stern school of business, wherein you can take business classes, or potentially meet other NYU kids with ideas for startups, and business-side knowledge (though much more frequently you'll meet Sternies with ideas ripped off from other websites, and 0 ability to do anything productive for the site, who really just want to use you for grunt work programming their wonderful idea.)
Good luck with college applications, and may you end up with a wonderful department!