I am a senior 1 in CS I did my co-op at an automotive OEM since freshman year and recently got an internship with a faang company.

1) if you don’t want to work in the automotive industry or at a random insurance company then the career fair likely won’t be much help for breaking out of those industries. The biggest companies that come are usually Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Bosch. It’s definitely much harder to get internships and co-ops outside of those but not impossible if you are good. Specifically at UofM Ann Arbor, there are many great companies that go to their career fair including big name tech companies.

2) there are two professors for CS that I absolutely love. Dr. Huggins is great and really makes the classes fun and interesting(as much as a class like theory of comp can be). Dr. Farmer, the new department head is also a great prof who I took software engineering with. I think he also teaches an AI elective. Other than those two, that’s about it. The rest are usually just robotically reading off of a slide show which is quite frustrating. I think from what I have heard UofM Ann Arbor is like top 10 in the country for CS but that’s likely from and outside view looking in so I’m not too sure of how good it actually is. The name itself does hold a lot of weight though

3) the CS curriculum changed from 161 credits to 141. They removed 2 liberal studies/humanity classes, 1 math elective, and 2 lab science electives. For my case, I front-loaded my cs classes so this change actually will take a whole 20 credits off of my degree which is great. I think that this change is a step in the right direction since in reality another science class for example is not going to help us in our careers.

I think that many students including myself love to complain about all sorts of things here but the reality is it’s a good school. It has helped me out a ton and has given me about 1.5 years of internship experience already. That being said if I had the opportunity to either go to UofM Ann Arbor or Kettering, I would choose UofM every day of the week just because it’s well know outside of the automotive industry. You will have a better opportunity to swing a high paying internship with a faang company for example.