The University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Campus

Date: Jul 29 2014
Major: Computer Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
LOW QUALITY UNIVERSITY.

Lecturers seem to be

researchers first, lecturers second

Some lecturers are pretty good, but most of them are absolutely terrible. Some stand there and read off slides, and then can't answer questions in class without fumbling over the question for at least 5 minutes. Some just can NOT speak English. Most classes are worthless: in some classes I probably could have gotten by just reading the textbook and doing the assigned work, and never even attending class; in fact, I've gone to entire courses never paying attention to the lecturer at all and gotten decent grades. I'm still not sure why I went to those classes.

Speaking of textbooks, most of the required textbooks are the newest, most expensive edition, while reviews on amazon and elsewhere for these books are very poor. It seems Pitt has partnerships and doesn't care much for the quality of your education - as long as you pay them money, they don't care. For example: one of the books listed as 'required' for me for a class starting one month from now is the 10th edition of a book that currently only has 9 editions, and the 9th edition got terrible reviews on amazon (

Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists

by Walpole).

The course content seems passable, at best. It's not amazing or anything. My friends who went to Case, Penn State, and CMU seem to have come out with much more knowledge than I did from their curriculum. There are very obvious holes in the computer engineering curriculum. Students are taught things like Java and C, which is fine for 2000's era "enterprisey" businesses, but aren't taught newer languages like Python or Ruby; web technology isn't required, databases aren't required, security isn't required, and I'm not sure if we even offer anything related to functional programming (not even LISP, which seems to be REQUIRED, FIRST SEMESTER for any computer science major elsewhere), no mention of design patterns. In fact, to me, it seems like I didn't learn either computer science theory OR the "engineering" side of computer engineering. It seems like I just learned a bunch of basic topics in computer technology.

Dorms are good; apartments around Oakland are generally shady as ****. I generally don't feel safe in South Oakland at night. School cafeteria is mediocre at best. Peers are generally very friendly - I had a lot of fun in the marching band. Some places on campus are beautiful, once you get past Pitt's awful Brutalist architecture.

Overall, especially for computer engineers: go somewhere else if you can. Pitt should probably be a "backup school" for you.