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Work for computer student?

As an international student should I go for any one of University of Toronto, Waterloo in Canada or any one of UIUC, USC, UCLA in USA, for my Maters in Computer Science, if I want to work in Bay Area/Silicon Valley after post graduation?

  • I checked this answer which talks about under-graduation in CS: How much of this is true for MS too? Are there any advantages of Canada over USA or vice versa?

  • Answer:

    Thanks for the A2A! To me, all of those sound fine to great for getting an M.S. The US schools you list are all top 20 CS grad school programs and the Canadian schools are the top two there and seem to have comparably strong programs, and I've heard good things about attending all of them. I think Waterloo is technically considered more of a strong undergraduate program than graduate, but it's still definitely good, and it also has the advantage of being a bit smaller than the other schools you list. The main question I would ask is what you want to do with said degree as someone working in the Bay in the tech industry after your undergraduate degree. Getting an M.S. can definitely increase what you earn, but casual observation suggests to me that it's not going to do you much more service than just going straight in unless you have very clear goals about what specialty you want to have and keep a very applied focus on it (i.e. make sure you still have solid software development abilities afterwards). It might also be worthwhile to do research to see if the things you want to research are things you could learn about on the job.

Xanda Schofield at Quora Visit the source

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From my experience, very few companies care about your formal education. The network you get from a particular school might matter, though. I've meet a lot of Stanford, Berkeley, and USC alumni working in the area. However, I doubt that simply going to these schools will get you hired. As long as you can demonstrate the talent then someone in the area will hire you. You could just contact a recruiting firm in the area. Your international status will probably hurt your chances, though. Companies have to work really hard to get work visas, and sometimes they don't want to put in the effort. You might what to choose a school in the USA simply to get the student visa, use that as a springboard for an internship, and eventually get a work visa.

Jonathan Nacionales

There are three main things I'd consider affecting your chances of Bay area employment: strength of CS subfield, networking potential, and cost of visa sponsorship. Rankings don't matter for the four schools you list -- they're all pretty recognizable names. When you break down the graduate CS programs, they excel in different areas, so you have to pick your emphasis within CS. Networking is critical. A lot of jobs are landed not by knocking on the front door and competing via merit (because there will be a lot of competing coders smarter than you), but by who you know. USC and UCLA are the best choices for building a network in California that can get you to the Bay area, and USC's alumni network is better than that of UCLA. Visa sponsorship could be a deal-breaker for many companies, especially startups with limited cash. Why would a company pay $3k or more extra for a new CS major when there are plenty of other CS majors who can already work in the US? Getting to USC and UCLA gives you a head start to work on that issue before graduation. All things equal, you might consider USC.

Eric Huang

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