Comment by ben7799
6 days ago
The new curriculum might be worse but I'm not sure how a 4th year undergraduate should be too sure of themselves when second guessing the department.
My undergraduate degree is from RPI, I have worked with many NU grads, they are often very good, but there have been many eye opening moments for me with them in terms of how different the material they learned was and what was left for graduate school when it comes other the core mathematical fundamentals of computer science. To be fair I've run into engineers from other schools that leave all of this to graduate school too. My first internship I shared a cubicle with a graduate student at Boston University. She was taking a graduate course on algorithm proofs and the course used the same book that we had used in the major weed out class that we had in the spring of Freshman year.
"Program Design" has changed almost as often as popular programming languages during my career. Almost none of those core mathematical fundamentals have changed at all.
Would be interested on hearing more if you expanded on that point about differences in material.
Types of automata and computability
Algorithm proofs around complexity, efficiency, etc..
At least an introduction to the design of languages, parsers, and grammars
Algorithms and concepts in the design of different database designs (not how to use specific databases)
Fundamentals of operating systems and systems programming
Some crossover with computer systems engineering courses. You must know at a basic level how logic gates are implemented, how an ALU is built, and how these blocks are built up to construct a CPU
These are the actual fundamentals of CS and they change at glacial pace compared to languages and design patterns.
I can't speak to your experiences with others from my alma mater but pretty much all of these things are covered in the core CS curriculum at NU (at least the pre-redesigned one). Systems, PL, Algorithms, Algorithmic proofs, automata, ALU design were all part of required courses, and that's before I include the elective CS courses I took.
One area where NU does fall down IMO is that they offer "combined majors" with CS and other subjects that eschew some of these courses to make room for the other half of the major, which will be an unrelated subject. This offering is a mistake because you do miss out on some key concepts. If you're working with a pure CS major, however, they were required to learn all these concepts.