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How could I transfer to Stanford?

Should I transfer to Stanford?

  • I'm a Sophomore at a college with a Top-20 CS department, and major in CS. What I ultimately want to do is build web and smartphone applications. But my university offers very few web and app development courses. There is a web dev minor, but I've taught myself everything they teach. So I'm here taking a bunch of CS courses (that are interesting but not too integral to web dev) and a bunch of business and GE courses (that are required for my specific major) and I think I might be better off a Stanford, majoring in something with CS and web dev. What do you think? How hard is it?

  • Answer:

    Stanford doesn't really have a "web dev" major/minor of any sort.  CS is in the engineering school at Stanford, so in order to major in it you really have to put a lot of time into CS, not just the part you seem to be interested in.  A minor, I believe, requires a lot of the core theory and systems classes that will definitely make you a better engineer and programmer, but won't specifically make you a better web/mobile designer. That said, Stanford does offer a lot of great HCI and web/mobile applications classes, but certainly this is not what the department is known for.  If web/mobile is what you're really passionate about, you can find it at Stanford, but I wouldn't advise transferring to Stanford for that reason alone.  Stanford will definitely give you a very strong foundation in CS, both theory and practice, and you should be well prepared to write great web/mobile apps if you fill your schedule with the right classes, but it's not the only school that teaches this kind of development well. Stanford does offer a lot of material publicly online (http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx), so you might be able to learn some good stuff from that without having to transfer schools.  I saw the iPhone programming class on the list of classes there. I think the most important thing to ask yourself is whether you're happy where you are and whether you're getting enough of what you want to do.  If you just aren't excited by any of the classes offered at your school, it's not going to be fun to go there, and maybe transferring is a good idea.  But definitely think carefully about it.  Stanford is a great place, but make sure it's really what you want before you decide to make the change.

Michael Harris at Quora Visit the source

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Let me preface this by saying that I have been building web apps since I graduated from college with a Stanford CS degree nine years ago. I would advise you not to focus on whether your program (or Stanford's program) has courses that specifically teach web or mobile phone development. Take the more generic CS courses and learn everything you can. You can supplement those courses with a few web/smartphone programming classes if you wish, but it is far more important that you are have a solid foundation in the fundamentals of computer science. Technologies change frequently. Use your college education to learn how to learn - that skill will serve you far better than any one particular technology at this point in the game. In the time since I've graduated I've had to learn nearly a dozen web frameworks, covering 6 different languages, all of which are unique in their own ways. Without my training in CS fundamentals I wouldn't be nearly as effective as I am. Those skills let me quickly analyze and learn the frameworks that I need, while still writing quality code. When I interview candidates at my current job, and it is far more important to me that the candidates demonstrate a knowledge of good programming practice than the ins and outs of jQuery or Rails or Hibernate or any other framework. If they can't understand a concept in pseudocode, why would they be able to apply it in a given language? If my memory is correct, the Stanford CS department does offer classes in several web/mobile technologies, but very few of those actually count toward a CS major. While I could give you a huge list of reasons to do so, I specifically would not transfer to Stanford if your main reason for doing so is exposure to these classes.

Tony Dorie

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