I went to the University of Illinois. That’s a solid tech school pretty much across the board, often cracking the top five in a number of subjects, including CS.
But the real secret of that school was that, at least when I was there, they had too much computer hardware for the number of students.
The number of hours in a day you could show up in a lab and not have a waitlist was fairly generous. Which meant a lot of the smarter students had no problem working on their own pet projects.
From a “hit the ground running” standpoint, a lot of these kids were only bothering with a 3.3-3.9 GPA because time spent getting three more points on a test or homework was time lost from working on your project, or talking to people about theirs.
But the real secret of that school was that, at least when I was there, they had too much computer hardware for the number of students.
The number of hours in a day you could show up in a lab and not have a waitlist was fairly generous. Which meant a lot of the smarter students had no problem working on their own pet projects.
From a “hit the ground running” standpoint, a lot of these kids were only bothering with a 3.3-3.9 GPA because time spent getting three more points on a test or homework was time lost from working on your project, or talking to people about theirs.