As an NYU CompSci major, I'll say that if you were going to choose a school entirely based on the quality of its CS department, NYU is not the way to go.
First off, the department is small. Intro classes are offered every semester, though after even the first course, you end up with no flexibility in selection of times or instructors. Every Major-required course is offered every semester, so no worries there, but again, professor choice and classtime options are non-existant.
Moving on to the electives: The most popular electives are offered maybe every semester, as a single course, but it is much more common to see electives given only one slot every year. The less popular (either for teaching or for students themselves; I'm not sure) electives are offered as rarely as once every two years, and they include things such as Intro to Database Systems, Unix Tools, or other things that seem like they should be offered more frequently.
A plus is that you can take graduate level courses as electives, and there are quite a few interesting topics offered there. If you're looking to do web development, currently there is a Googler-taught course on Ruby on Rails, but little choice in the way of others such as Django or PHP. Actually, the CS department intentionally gimps some of the more interesting courses, reducing them to having zero value towards the completion of your major. (Web Development is an overview course that happens to be one of them.)
That said, NYC is an amazing place to be, and I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else, even given a better CS department. As well, you have the option of the Stern school of business, wherein you can take business classes, or potentially meet other NYU kids with ideas for startups, and business-side knowledge (though much more frequently you'll meet Sternies with ideas ripped off from other websites, and 0 ability to do anything productive for the site, who really just want to use you for grunt work programming their wonderful idea.)
Good luck with college applications, and may you end up with a wonderful department!
Comments
As an NYU CompSci major, I'll say that if you were going to choose a school entirely based on the quality of its CS department, NYU is not the way to go. First off, the department is small. Intro classes are offered every semester, though after even the first course, you end up with no flexibility in selection of times or instructors. Every Major-required course is offered every semester, so no worries there, but again, professor choice and classtime options are non-existant.
Moving on to the electives: The most popular electives are offered maybe every semester, as a single course, but it is much more common to see electives given only one slot every year. The less popular (either for teaching or for students themselves; I'm not sure) electives are offered as rarely as once every two years, and they include things such as Intro to Database Systems, Unix Tools, or other things that seem like they should be offered more frequently.
A plus is that you can take graduate level courses as electives, and there are quite a few interesting topics offered there. If you're looking to do web development, currently there is a Googler-taught course on Ruby on Rails, but little choice in the way of others such as Django or PHP. Actually, the CS department intentionally gimps some of the more interesting courses, reducing them to having zero value towards the completion of your major. (Web Development is an overview course that happens to be one of them.)
That said, NYC is an amazing place to be, and I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else, even given a better CS department. As well, you have the option of the Stern school of business, wherein you can take business classes, or potentially meet other NYU kids with ideas for startups, and business-side knowledge (though much more frequently you'll meet Sternies with ideas ripped off from other websites, and 0 ability to do anything productive for the site, who really just want to use you for grunt work programming their wonderful idea.)
Good luck with college applications, and may you end up with a wonderful department!