

Can Ivy leaguers groomed for success navigate the failure-friendly tech economy? - iProject
http://betabeat.com/2012/07/harvard-tech-boom-silicon-alley-valley-crimson-mit-stanford/

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me2i81
Harvard just isn't top tier in either computer science or electrical
engineering, or any tech-heavy engineering field you can think of, really.
This article manages to spew a bunch of nonsense about incubators while
ignoring that fact. What they call "even humble University of Washington" is a
top-10 CS school, and Harvard is not.

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strlen
For what it's worth, Cornell is the only Ivy League school amongst the top-10
for CS.

That said, there is still a strong reason to consider a private university
(even if they are not in the top 10 for CS, but are still amongst the top 25).
Many of the flag ship state universities do not directly admit students to the
CS department. CS major is considered "impacted", and admission criteria may
have very little to do with programming ability (e.g., UW CSE emphasizes
grades in Physics and Math).

OTOH, I believe you can still transfer into the UC Berkeley BA CS program --
in the College of Arts and Letters from a community college with ~3.6-3.8 GPA.
Transferring or getting admitted into the BS EECS program (in the school of
engineering) is much harder, but the CS classes the students take are no
different. The "BA" vs. "BS" means very little at Berkeley, as they also grant
BAs in Physics/Math/etc...

If you're intrinsically motivated and are fairly set on being a software
engineer or going to grad school in CS (as opposed to also pondering
electrical/computer engineering), going to a community college which is
considered a feeder school for Berkeley (such as De Anza College) and
transferring into the BA CS program at Berkeley/UCLA/UCSD/UCSC seems to be
route of least resistance.

Of course the big downsides are losing the first 2-3[1] years of the social
"college experience" (important if you're more interested in entrepreneurship
rather than being an individual contributor) as well as limited internship
opportunities during freshman/sophomore years (OTOH participating in open
source or doing side projects will help greatly).

[1] It can take up 3 or more years to transfer due to lack of space in many
general education and major pre-requisite classes: I was unable to register in
a vector calculus class until sophomore year just due to supply/demand and
lack of registration priority.

~~~
me2i81
Princeton gets on some top 10 lists as well. But the point isn't that there's
anything wrong with Harvard or the Ivies in general (you'll surely get a fine
CS education at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Penn, maybe even
Yale), the point is that the center of gravity in the tech startup world is
right now at the schools with top-tier CS and Engineering departments, and
it's not because they have some special "incubator" sauce that other
universities don't, it's just that they attract a large body of
entrepreneurially-focused students.

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martingordon
It's worth noting that Ms. Faircloth is a graduate of Harvard University:
<http://www.manhattangmat.com/staff-faircloth.cfm>

I'm also not sure why she's picking on Penn (my alma mater) in both the title
of the article ("techies are flocking even to Penn") and in the article itself
("the red-headed stepchild of the Ivy League"), considering US News and World
Report ranks Harvard's CS program tied with Penn's
([http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/graduate-
schools/sc...](http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/graduate-
schools/sciences/computer-science.aspx?page=2)).

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brodney
No.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

~~~
scarmig
Huh. I know the law, and it seems to apply here but in the opposite direction.

I might amend it to say that any headline with a question that considers some
contrarian perspective can be appended with the less contrarian response.

