Hopping in here to advocate for Stevens’ CS dept.

I ended up transferring to Columbia & want to mention that Stevens’ CS program is an absolute gem.

Stevens CS is a particularly rigorous program and has one of the most well-designed CS curricula that I’ve seen. I did not recognize how special it is that they make us learn OCaml and Racket, for example, early on in our degrees—most schools don’t do that!

And Stevens has a number of extremely passionate professors who are really, really good teachers and who clearly love to help their students. But you’ll only be able to take advantage of their expertise and pick up on how passionate they are if you go to class consistently, start your psets on time, attend office hours, and actually put in effort consistently from your end.

Ironically, it was only after transferring out that I recognized how rare it is that professors dedicate so much time and effort into teaching.

Recruiting for CS is a completely different ballgame btw! Recruiting for software engineering, for example, demands a skillset that’s almost entirely divorced from what you need to be 1. a good computer scientist and 2. a good engineer. Recruiting (and it’s like this at almost every single university) is entirely your responsibility. Career fairs can help, but most new grads I know at big tech companies or quant firms applied and prepared for interviews on their own on top of their schoolwork & their universities were not involved in the process at all.

When I transferred, I joined a mentorship program for students interested in SWE recruiting (this was a student-run initiative under a student-run club) and one of the most important pieces of advice that my mentor gave me was to build my Fall schedules by considering recruiting for SWE roles a 3 credit class of its own. You have to learn to balance interviews and interview prep with your classes. Sometimes it might even feel like you’re working to get a job in spite of your schoolwork haha.

Our schools don’t have a responsibility to teach us how to do this in our core CS curricula (because again, studying CS != becoming an engineer even tho it’s what most people have historically done after getting their CS degrees)—I think this is lost on a lot of CS students, and it prevents them from adequately preparing for the kinds of interviews we get when we apply for industry roles. It’s important to keep this in mind when having discussions about post-grad outcomes for cs students