Undergraduate Admissions

Department Overview

A Rensselaer undergraduate education in computer science prepares students both to solve real-world problems and to do fundamental research. Our students have distinguished themselves in many ways: they have founded companies while still in school; taken high paying jobs at companies such as IBM, Microsoft, GE, and Morgan Stanley, and gone on to prominent graduate schools.

Our program is rigorous yet flexible. The rigor makes our students highly desirable for industrial employment after graduation. The average starting salary for students graduating in 2008 was over $67,000. The flexibility allows our students to do dual majors in computer science and another discipline such as Engineering, Management, Mathematics, Philosophy, or Electronic Media Arts and Communication (EMAC), or Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences.

Students have the opportunity to participate in the:

Cisco Academy, in which they can take courses leading to Cisco Network certification.
Center for Open Source Software, in which they participate in open source software development to solve societal problems.
Co-op program, in which they get to apply what they have learned in the classroom to a real world situation by working in industry while enrolled as a student.
Undergraduate Research Program, in which they participate in the research program of one of our faculty.

Our students are also active in extracurricular activities including the Association for Computing Machinery, Upsilon Pi Epsilon (Computer Science honor society), RPISEC (the computer security club), the Games Club, and the student newspaper. With more than 100 student organizations on campus, most students will find opportunities to pursue their extracurricular interests.

The department has 25 full-time faculty members, renowned nationally and internationally for their work. In addition, every semester, several adjunct and visiting faculty enrich the department with their experience from business and from other academic institutions. Our faculty conduct research on topics such as algorithm design, bioinformatics, computational geometry, computational science and engineering, computer graphics, computer vision, data mining, database systems, grid computing, machine learning, networking, parallel and distributed computing, programming languages and software engineering, robotics, and semantic web.

Both faculty and staff are available to help students with academic, personal, and career development. Every student is assigned a faculty advisor who assists with choosing courses and making decisions about careers and graduate school.

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