A father wrote me asking for advice on where to send his son for an undergraduate Computer Science degree. I mentioned Olin College or a smaller liberal arts school with a good CS program so that the kid would have some friends who weren’t CS majors. I cc’d Shimon Rura, a graduate of Williams College, for some perspective on the liberal arts school choice. Shimon was a powerful advocate for Williams (aside from the high cost) and also said some interesting stuff about Olin:
“What has really blown my mind are the people I’ve met from Olin. I’ve met them at geek events I’ve organized, such as BarCamp Boston (an ad-hoc tech conference) and DevHouse Boston (a weekend of free-form hacking). They’ve all had great ideas for fun/useful stuff to build, and have been able to work in teams to build the stuff they envisioned. Though they were always younger (around 19), they were clearly able to work among and talk with people much older. And they were not novices; they answered a lot of technical questions. Plus they showed up early and helped make sure all the equipment worked. If I had to hire a software engineer right out of college, I would look at Olin graduates. The best graduates, however, would probably want to start their own company rather than working for someone else. Since the most difficult task in starting a company is finding good co-founders, attending Olin would provide a young programmer with a big head start.”
Perhaps we should not abandon all hope of a useful undergraduate CS education…
For what it’s worth, when I conduct a technical interview and look at a resume, CS is almost always the least persuasive of all possible majors. It’s not a negative, but I’ve found that just about any other major tells me more about a candidate than CS.
Rob S: that may be an aftereffect of the dot-com boom in CS majors. Seems like a self-correcting problem after the current wave clears out.
philg: Olin seems like a really impressive place. Any chance of its success being replicated? It seems like our nation could use more schools with this approach to learning.
Great, you had to let the cat out of the bag, just as we are interviewing Olin students for full time and summer internships. Thanks, Philip! As if finding intelligent programmers who can speak was hard enough..
We’ve been generally very impressed with Olin. We hosted 5 students just this past Friday for a “meet-n-greet” so we can interview candidates and they can get to know our company better. We also participated in a career fair a few weeks ago. At the fair, there were 40 companies, which is pretty amazing considering there are only 75 graduates per year.
This fall, we participated at career fairs at MIT, Northeastern, etc. and Olin had the most consistently good students. Other schools had the occasional exceptional candidate, but also a lot of chaff.
JimH: the model is not easily replicated especially since all Olin students have a full scholarship. It’s a completely different dynamic when the school looks at a potential student as an investment rather than a source of money to leech.
Just one clarification, unfortunately, Olin doesn’t actually offer a CS degree. What we do offer is a Bachelors of Engineering with a concentration in Computer Science. This means that students interested in CS take a wide variety of engineering courses, but have less technical depth in CS then a traditional CS degree requires. Check out our course catalog if you’re interested in exactly what we offer. http://www.olin.edu/academics/pdf/course_catalog_07_08.pdf
That said, a lot of our students go off into software jobs post-Olin. I know out of our 70 or so job-seeking graduates, we have 6 at Google, 1 at Yahoo, a good handful at Solidworks, and tons at small software startups around Boston and the rest of the US. Heck, even I did software all summer.
Cheers
-Michael Ducker, Olin ’09
Jim: I don’t think it would be difficult to replicate Olin’s success. You simply have to turn all of a university’s lecture halls into labs and then tell the professors “You’re not allowed to talk for more than 20 minutes straight; find some way other than lecturing to teach engineering students.” Fairly quickly I think the other schools would converge on the Olin way of doing things.
Let me also add Swarthmore College. It was one of the first small liberal arts colleges to have a full accredited engineering program, and it also has a CS program.
Other schools that are attempting the “from the ground up” integrated engineering programs are Rowan University in New Jersey and Daniel Webster College in New Hampshire.