The Purdue CS department is much better at the graduate school level.
Personally, having taught at the Purdue CS undergrad level, I would not recommend the undergraduate program here. Class sizes are absurdly large, and still growing. While there are many bright, talented undergraduates here, they are far outnumbered by lackluster placeholders, looking for nothing more than a place to hide out from the Real World(tm) for a couple of years.
As for the graduate level, there are a variety of really good professors here. (They, too, are outnumbered by lackluster Elder Gods of FORTRAN, but they are here.) If you can find a professor to work with whose research really interests you, you're in business wherever s/he is.
As a PhD student in the Purdue CS department, I can testify that the Purdue CS department is pretty decent. While Purdue as a whole is huge, the CS graduate portion is reasonably cozy. We have on the order of 30 PhD students, and 150 Masters students. As the oldest CS PhD granting department, we have a sizeable presence in the Numerical Analysis field, and in other mathematics/theory areas. Purdue CS's other areas of strength include security, (inter)networking, databases, and parallel computing. However, if you are not interested in one of these general areas, you should probably look elsewhere.
I agree strongly with the other posts that advise prospective grad students to examine carefully each school's strong research areas; also, definately try to correspond with faculty whose work interests you -- there's really no other way to reliably judge whether or not you'll like the research there. I came to Purdue without looking closely into the CS department's research areas, assuming that a well-known school at the top of the second-tier would have cool research that interested me. Fortunately, I lucked out, and stumbled across truly fascinating work with a great professor. But many of the friends I started here with have not been nearly as lucky.
The campus is compact, as convenient as can be expected for 37,000 students, and quite beautiful if you like red brick and elaborate fountains.
As for there being "nothing to do here," I will agree that the town is somewhat sedate. But if you're genuinely interested in graduate study in the Computer Sciences, you won't have much time for tangential distractions in the next couple of years anyway.
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The Purdue CS department is much better at the graduate school level.
Personally, having taught at the Purdue CS undergrad level, I would not recommend the undergraduate program here. Class sizes are absurdly large, and still growing. While there are many bright, talented undergraduates here, they are far outnumbered by lackluster placeholders, looking for nothing more than a place to hide out from the Real World(tm) for a couple of years.
As for the graduate level, there are a variety of really good professors here. (They, too, are outnumbered by lackluster Elder Gods of FORTRAN, but they are here.) If you can find a professor to work with whose research really interests you, you're in business wherever s/he is.
As a PhD student in the Purdue CS department, I can testify that the Purdue CS department is pretty decent.
While Purdue as a whole is huge, the CS graduate portion is reasonably cozy. We have on the order of 30 PhD students, and 150 Masters students.
As the oldest CS PhD granting department, we have a sizeable presence in the Numerical Analysis field, and in other mathematics/theory areas. Purdue CS's other areas of strength include security, (inter)networking, databases, and parallel computing. However, if you are not interested in one of these general areas, you should probably look elsewhere.
I agree strongly with the other posts that advise prospective grad students to examine carefully each school's strong research areas; also, definately try to correspond with faculty whose work interests you -- there's really no other way to reliably judge whether or not you'll like the research there.
I came to Purdue without looking closely into the CS department's research areas, assuming that a well-known school at the top of the second-tier would have cool research that interested me. Fortunately, I lucked out, and stumbled across truly fascinating work with a great professor. But many of the friends I started here with have not been nearly as lucky.
The campus is compact, as convenient as can be expected for 37,000 students, and quite beautiful if you like red brick and elaborate fountains.
As for there being "nothing to do here," I will agree that the town is somewhat sedate. But if you're genuinely interested in graduate study in the Computer Sciences, you won't have much time for tangential distractions in the next couple of years anyway.