A Northwest Pipeline to Silicon Valley(nytimes.com) |
A Northwest Pipeline to Silicon Valley(nytimes.com) |
UW CSE is still entirely focused on grades. There's literally no way to include anything but grades in your admission application -- not even recommendation letters. I've talked to some of the admissions faculty, and their argument is that it's unfair to people who are totally new to computer science to deny them on the basis of a lack of prior experience. I totally disagree with this, however -- you're not going to get into a music or acting program without any prior experience, why should you get into a CS program?
From what I've seen, a lot of UW graduates end up getting recruited into a big company (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, etc). It's by all means a great program, but it seems like they're never going to have someone they can point to as a success like, for example, Harvard, Stanford, or MIT. I think that's the reason why their reputation is a lot more quiet.
FWIW, my co-founder and I have both been rejected from UW CSE (me with an overall 3.8 GPA and several conference papers published as first author while I was still in high school).
There are tons, I mean tons, of great startups coming out of UW, but they are not coming from the CSE program. They are coming from math, physics, life sciences, and even the entrepreneurship program at the Foster b-school. All the kids who I've met making waves in the Seattle startup scene are informally trained hackers. Oh and by the way, did I mention they are all young and under 23-24, and not PhD/Master's students?
This article is all good for the image of the school and Seattle, but it fails to grasp the real movement of the scene. The movers and shakers, the ones at the crest of a huge potential tsunami in Seattle, are the young people who never got the silver spoon of CS programs, and thus will never be lured away to cushy $80k jobs as entry-level coder at Amazon.
I know lots of software people in and around Seattle, and I've worked at a couple startups here. A few are "informally trained hackers", but most are formally trained -- only elsewhere (mostly Stanford, or east coast schools you've heard of).
While everyone knows that UW has a good CS department, I don't think I know a single person who went there. I actually know more programmers who went to Whitman (one) than UW.
I don't know where they're going: maybe they leave town, or maybe they're getting hired by big companies, or maybe I'm just hanging out in the wrong circles (quite possible).
This, exactly, has been my sentiment since starting at UW. There are plenty of capable, intelligent people who seem to have never written code prior to starting on the CS track. On the whole, the undergraduate program seems to have a very myopic focus. CS is not Biochemistry or Particle Physics - the equipment requirement is $50 for a used Ti-83 to learn BASIC on and catch the bug.
> but it seems like they're never going to have someone they can point to as a success like, for example, Harvard, Stanford, or MIT. I think that's the reason why their reputation is a lot more quiet.
I think the canonical success is Jeff Dean...who went there for graduate school and was immensely successful beforehand. For what it's worth, Harvard doesn't have too many success stories either. Both Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out, and it's a school with a reputation for fostering careers more than entrepreneurship. In many ways, it's more similar to UW than UW is to Stanford.
It's very different from two of the other top 5 schools I've gone to, where you're told that if you succeed, one day you'll be working at Microsoft (in the olden days, not much anymore) or Facebook or some other hot uppercomer. It's somewhat demoralizing when you're taught how to write reports to upper management, always assuming that you want to be an employee (this was from a graduate program).
I was instead drawn to the Informatics program, which is less technical but provides a much better environment for entrepreneurship: we trade project management, information organization, and a web design/development focus for computer science theory and engineering.
A tragic design/planning flaw of UW is that the engineering departments are on the opposite side of campus (~8 minute walk) from the business school. Collaboration is isolated and leaves little serendipitous idea exchanges that could very well develop into potent startups. I can only imagine how things might be different if UW had made the two neighbors...
I'm confused reading the admission comments. It seems you get admitted to UW undergrad, and then after two years you apply to the CSE thing. Are you considered undeclared until then? Is there any kind of test or is it entirely based on grades in the initial weeder classes?
That seems like kind of a big risk to people who want to study a specific subject and might not get admitted to it. The'd just have to switch career ambitions or start over at another college with about a one year delay for transferring.
Most state schools I see admit you to a specific major before you matriculate. Then you can change fairly flexibly within your department if you have the right classes and good grades. Elite schools usually admit undeclared students and then have them choose an area of study after a year with no further admission criteria.
Are the UW faculty trying to build an elite program inside a non-elite university? That's an interesting idea, but I don't think I'd want to be the guinea pig who has to suffer for it.
Second, if all you want to do is make it into UW CSE, it is a risk. I remember the anxiety I went through as an undergrad waiting to here about whether I was excepted into the program or not. I got in, but it was by no means certain (I had 2.9/3.2/3.8 grades for physics, mostly do to me being slow to adjust to high-pressure weed out classes).
I believe most public state schools are like this, they might have a few programs that are very high-quality compared to others, and therefore have to limit supply even after they have accepted students into the general population.
Both UBC and SFU have solid track records (beating UW consistently) when it comes to ACM CS competition:
https://sites.google.com/site/ubcprogrammingteam/history
Yes, gotta start some sort of pride-war between schools no? :)
And yes, it's quite high risk. After being rejected my co-founder printed out his rejection letter and framed it, dropped out of UW, and took a job as the head of development for a local iPhone shop. Most people either keep trying, or switch to a math major. It's extremely stupid and elitist.
In Seattle, it's a buyers market and you can grab some office space or a hacker house for a lot less.
There are more startup resources in the Valley (accelerators/angels/VCs), but that doesn't mean there is a good amount in the Emerald City. One of them, Madrona Venture Group (http://www.madrona.com/), just raised $300M to be invested in startups. There are also a few hacker spaces popping up, such as Surf Incubator (http://www.surfincubator.com).
If you want a good place to start your company with less competition and more rain, move to Seattle.
The tech community here is great, and the university is moving towards supporting entre x CS... especially through its CS Entrepreneurship courses.
There's definitely work to do, but the city and the university are moving in the right direction.
Odd line given that Berkeley is also on the West Coast and is ranked as high as Stanford.
This is a NYT Technology article, don't expect anything to make sense.
It's both a disappointing waste of talent and bad for the Seattle startup community.
My working assumption is that the tech press is so massively insular it has a lot of difficulty seeing beyond the silicon valley / NYC scene.
UW CS had a huge increase in admissions (and yield) for the Ph.D. program this year. IIRC they mentioned the incoming class size is almost twice what they had last year.
Aided by a recent budget increase, the department also hired a massive number of new faculty this year.
Obviously written by someone who doesn't live in Seattle. Seattle is a beautiful city in a very beautiful location. Today it's sunny, 70 degrees, with spectacular views of the lakes, trees, and snow-capped Olympic mountains.
I'd say three seasons; there isn't really a proper winter. The average high temp in December (the coldest month) is 45 degrees...
I think it’s worth it, but it is a legitimate problem for some people.
To fend off uninformed remarks elsewhere in the comments, here’s Wikipedia on the climate of Seattle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle#Climate
And to fend off uninformed remarks about seasonal affective disorder, which is real but doesn’t account for every instance of feeling bad in winter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder
http://weatherspark.com/averages/29735/Seattle-Washington-Un...
From the months of October well into June, I have a constant struggle to stay motivated with such dreary weather. I know Portland isn't Seattle, but I visit Seattle often and it's almost as "bad" as Portland when it comes to the weather. Many of my friends here don't mind the weather and actually love the rain. As someone that needs sunlight, I can't stay up here another year, I will be moving back down to the bay area this upcoming fall. It really is a shame because I do love Portland and Seattle very much.
If only the Northwest had just a little bit more sunlight, I would never consider moving down. But those few months in the Winter/Spring really take a toll on me.
Summer is great in both cities.
Seattle averages about 200 mostly cloudy to overcast days per year, and about 90 that are partly cloudy. You're right, it's amazingly beautiful up here, but it's also not sunny most of the time. Even with the clouds, I'll take living up here over being back in the Bay Area any time.
It is beautiful to me, but there are quite a lot of days with dark skies which does make it a little depressing.
And yes, Seattle traffic is terrible. It's one downside.
I personally enjoy the rainy days. They're quiet and peaceful, and make the air smell good. There's nothing quite like a nice rainy day when you're drinking coffee and working on your computer, in a plaid flannel shirt.
Coolness about Whitman. Walla Walla doesn't get enough love.
Waking up in the morning during the winter has been the worst part. I have always been an early riser, but when I just moved here, for about a year I could barely get up at 9am.
Your circadian rhythm is especially susceptible to the blue end of the spectrum so instead of a 10,000 watt sun lamp you can just use one of these (or perhaps a home-brewed equivalent with the right LEDs) to let your body know that, if you were in a better lattitude, the sun would be shining right now.
taking "required courses" (Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology...
What is exactly you're trying to point out? :)
UW had a ~58% admit rate in 2011, MIT's was 9.6%, Harvard's was 6.2%, and Stanford was 7.1%. To say "it's very hard to get in these days without the means to also getting into other elite universities" is patently false.
If you want empirical data, a student in the 25th percentile at MIT has a higher SAT score than someone in the 75th at UW. The SAT has been shown to be a fairly reliable indicator of earning potential.
[1] Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College, Dale & Krueger
Elite private universities (stanford, harvard) tend to have very small undergraduate populations and draw from a national or international pool of applicants. This of course makes them highly selective, as spots are scarce and the applicant pool is large. Public universities (Berkeley, UW) have very large undergraduate student bodies (often 5 times the size of a small private) and require a much larger portion of in-state students. More slots, smaller applicant pool means a much higher admission rate and generally lower numbers (SATs and so forth). Like another poster mentioned, 25%ile at MIT > 75% at UW, but the top 25% of the class at UW is larger than the entire undergrad population at MIT. The difference in nature of undergraduate admissions makes the averaging kind of meaningless.
At the graduate level, elite private and public universities tend to admit roughly similar numbers of students. And not surprisingly, admission rates are much more comparable. Elite publics, for some reason, seem to do particularly well at the grad level in engineering and computer science (aside from Cornell, the ivies don't really show up much on the top 10 lists, while Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and so forth are highly ranked - by the same magazine (US News) that doesn't put a single public into the top 20 at the undergrad level).
Lastly, there is the question of the degree itself. At top publics, engineering often requires a second admissions process - you get into Berkeley or UW, and then you have to keep your grades high enough to gain admission to the engineering or CS major. You can gain admission directly to the major from high school, but that's tougher. And the process of getting the degree itself is daunting - I don't know much about UW, but the coursework in CS at Berkeley is extremely rigorous (and I have no reason to think it wouldn't be at UW as well). As with UW, Berkeley does have a much larger undergraduate population. It's less selective because of that (and the in-state quota), but on the way out, we're talking about students in the top quarter of the class, from a major that is extremely difficult to enter and complete.
All in all, I'm not surprised that people would feel that the undergrads who make it out of CS from UW are among the top grads that year. The grad level programs are already known to be top 10, so I don't think that even comes up.
Of course, UW is not as exclusive as UW CSE, but to suggest UW itself is just a so so University is insulting to me.
I'm sorry you feel that way, I am merely sharing my experiences and impressions of the school, and "so so" is certainly how I would describe it. I had the fortune of attending a fairly elite international school abroad and a highly ranked public high school in Massachusetts. In both places the caliber of student was high, and I was rather disappointed to find university less so. I have my biases, as you yours, but I do believe my argument has some merit.
That said, to call a school "elite" because it is difficult for locals to get in is both disingenuous and inconsistent with your prior statement that it is nearly as competitive as its more widely known and more prestigious competitors. UW continues to care increasingly less about its undergraduate population and view them as a funding source for research as much as valuable contributors to the campus community. Tuition hikes are putting it closer and closer to the cost of attending a private university at the same time class sizes are larger than ever and making it so most fresher could go an entire year without so much as meeting a professor one-on-one.
What most boggles me however, is that Seattleites remain fiercely devoted to the school. In Massachusetts (and New England in general) it's rare to find ten people in a room having gone to the same university, whereas in Seattle it seems the rare occasion for that not to be the case. Is it the lack of viable alternatives for the highly capable wanting to stay close to home?
I rarely interact with other people from UW CSE, this is the case even in Seattle as its just not a very big program. However, I do know a couple of UW CSE graduates where I work today (Beijing China).
I have to say that my experience in a similar situation (many years ago) was similar and I agree.
But in your other comment where you said this:
"tens of former and current Stanford attendees while at Google"
You are taking a group of "Stanford attendees" who ended up with jobs at google. So I'm wondering to what extent that group is representative of Stanford attendees and not google's hiring practices. Was there a difference that you could tell with those working at google who didn't go to Stanford?
I stated that rather poorly. I am interning at Google in Mountain View for the Summer, but not all of the Stanford attendees I have met and spoken with at length are working there, though most at Google are certainly bright.
Regardless of whether they are working at Google, Facebook, hacking away in a SOMA loft, or hunkered down in their parents' garage all of them have been highly intelligent and fun to be around. Whether that's more representative of who I choose to befriend with than the university's admission practices is another question altogether ;)