I want to pursue game development professionally (or at least CS) and I was wondering what the good CS schools are? I can''t get into MIT, I have a chance at Caltech, I''ll definitely get into Cornell and Duke... any other good ones? Thanks!

Shameless plug: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a *very* good CS program, consistently ranking in the top 10 for undergraduate programs in the US. The graduate program, if anything, is even stronger. (Part of that is that we got one of the two surviving national supercomputing centers. And you really can''t beat a CAVE. )

Plus, the male/female ratio on campus is much better than it is at Caltech.

On the downside, UIUC doesn''t have the brand-name sexiness of other schools. (But who cares if we didn''t invent Lisp or Unix! We brought the world Mosiac! Bwa ha ha!)

University of Waterloo.
Ontario, Canada.
They have a really good looking Software Engineering program. Well known, respected (macleans top ten list etc.) and definately interesting curriculum.

Unless of course your asking for schools within The States only, then you shoulda said so!

- Jacob

[edited by - Kevlar-X on December 7, 2003 5:14:24 PM]

I''ll also take this chance to plug Canadian schools. Getting a top notch education for a fraction of the price is our motto. And by top notch I mean top notch - The Universities of Toronto and Waterloo consistently rank up with MIT, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon and the rest of them. It is worth considering.

- Ben

CMU.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys! As far as Canadian schools, I would like to stay in the US... but thanks!

As far as CMU... do they have a good graphics program? I looked at the computer graphics part of their site and it didn''t look very amazing.

If you''ve been through the program, tell me what you think!

I really dont think of MIT or cornell as game programming type of cs school, they definitly dont have ETC! Anyway here are some links for computer graphics and game related dept and classes at cmu:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/graphics/graphics.html
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/gfxcourses.html
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/02-graphics/
http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/
http://www.alice.org/bvw03/

currently there is also a class on programming NES but can''t seem to find any link for it...

we do have some very famous people on staff, but the problem is they keep getting taken away by the game industry...

are you more interested in the CG programming, arty modeling , game design, or AI?

Cornell has a department of Computer Graphics. Radiosity rendering was developed there.

i wouldn''t worry so much about getting specifics like in depth grappics or gaming courses.. if you go through a top notch CS program you''ll have the skills you need and can just pick up a book on a new subject and you''ll probably be better off.

oh yeah, cows has been through the program at CMU before!