Tell me about the CS program at William and Mary
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Anonymous
| My kid has a 4.3 with all As. |
Anonymous
It says 33 |
Anonymous
| My kid is a senior at WM double majoring in CS and Math. Not sure if his CS degree is going to be a BA or a BS, as both are offered (https://www.wm.edu/as/computerscience/undergraduate/). His focus in on machine learning and AI. Some of his upper level classes have been very small (one class this semester has only 6 students). He has a job offer for post-graduation, but he is still looking for other options. Based on what he tells me, I think the department is solid, but definitely doesn't yet have the depth of classes that bigger programs can offer. That may change going forward, I suppose. |
Anonymous
Look at averages---just because one kid got into one place and not another doesn't mean no others did. All these posts of this one kid who didn't get in, or what "we were told" doesn't change the fact that a sizable portion of FCPS kids DO get in with lower scores. Naviance and VT own data set as well as SCHEV shows us this. And I know for our own high school, a lot of those kids are in engineering. |
Anonymous
+1. Top tier schools don't care about the ABET certification. Michigan CS gave up their ABET certification for whatever reason and their kids are not affected by that. DS' friends are being placed at top companies for internships and jobs.. I'm talking Google/Citadel level. |
Anonymous
It will grow to some degree I imagine, but it's not really WM's aim to replicate the specificity of classes you see in a large university. It's a smaller school without extensive graduate programs (though it has a few)--it's more like a large LAC. It has a greater depth of CS classes than most LACs. But I wouldn't want it to move to replicate the larger publics in this regard because then you lose the heart of a WM degree which is they are focused on undergraduates, every graduate gets a very rigorous educational core across areas and has its classes mainly taught by full-time professors. There are trade-offs, but in my view if you want a very specialized CS degree, you are better off going to a tech school with an engineering department. If you want a broad, rigorous education with a CS major, WM is excellent. Both have the potential for very lucrative future trajectories. Congrats to your senior on his job offer and good luck in his continued search! With the tech layoffs of late (though I know unemployment has stayed very low), I have wondered how the new crop of grads --not just from WM but everywhere--will be doing. Having an offer in hand in December must feel good. |
Anonymous
Then their rigor isn’t there. Or, they are sophomores or juniors. |
Anonymous
seriously? That would give me pause. |
Anonymous
Junior. |
Anonymous
I've seen that happening more--CS isn't always best served tied to engineering standards and also needs to adapt quickly. |
Anonymous
You got it. If the ABET folks want to be purists, major in engineering ( only). Let the CS majors do their thing. |
Anonymous
My kid just got into W&M with a B in BC Calc. While there are general expectations, don't make any assumptions either way about whether something on the transcript or test score is a deal killer. |
Anonymous
| Current grads or from junior year? |
Anonymous
| ^current grade in the class? |
Anonymous
| One of the strengths of the CS program is that students have a lot of opportunities to conduct research (and get paid for it)--they often meet with faculty and develop technologies that help them work with data in new ways. Undergraduate CS end up working on projects that are more typical of grad students elsewhere--so they can end up with a lot of projects in a given data area, like bioinformatics or digital humanities or whatever else they are interested in. I think this keeps them very grounded in working with non-tech folks. |