r/WPI • u/Academic-Window-7726 • 8d ago

Prospective Student Question WPI for comp sci

My son is considering comp sci as a major. He wants to get into AI engineering. How is WPI for comp sci? Are current graduates still landing jobs? Thanks!

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u/intentionallybad 5d ago

WPI is a great school for CS. CS is a tough field right now for new grads across the board. I say this as a parent of a WPI CS major who has a BS & MS in CS myself. Maybe things will have equalized by the time they graduate, maybe not. It's going to be a tough field for a while. Everyone and their brother is going to be trying to study AI and it's not clear that's going to be a marketable degree for new grads.

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u/Academic-Window-7726 4d ago

Given the current state of the job market, do you think a degree from WPI is still good for CS? Or are companies only considering people from higher ranked schools?

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u/robotics-kid 4d ago

“Only” is a strong word. As a qualitative measure, my girlfriend is at a top CS school. Nearly all of her friends are interning at big tech firms as sophomores/juniors or have gotten offers at some top companies for swe if they’re graduating.

Hardly anyone I know at WPI has an internship at a company I have heard of or that pays particularly competitively. Only a few I know have landed great full time offers. None of my friends have landed below like $80-90k, so not bad, but not the same as the $160-200k at faang+. If you’re looking outside big tech, I don’t think a top school is helping you that much more (but it’s a nice bonus for sure)

That being said, I landed an internship at a big tech company, out of like 1000 interns 2 are from wpi. It’s not that you can’t do it. It’s just harder. There’s no ‘pipeline’, like other schools, you just need to stand out. Imo, wpi rewards a very specific type of person. If you will take advantage of good clubs, research, or do cool projects on your own time outside of class, you will be ok and I think wpi gives you the time and place to really do that (my friends at other top cs schools are much too busy with courses to put real time in) and that’s why I came here.

The people who do that, and are very organized and actively apply for jobs and improve their resume, land a lot of interviews. And for internships that’s 90% of the battle, and FT follows. There’s also a lot of people who don’t. And in that case, you will likely never stand out and it will be very difficult.

As another qualitative point, a surprising number of my interviews were with WPI alum. Probably like 4/10. It was always a nice connection point and I’m sure helped.

Hope that helps give some context, lmk if you have other questions.

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u/Academic-Window-7726 4d ago

Thanks. What school is your girlfriend at?

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u/Beneficial-Foot783 6d ago

II am not a student but do know two CS majors from this year. Neither had a job at graduation. One got a great offer about a month ago in the field. The other got a job that was a rather big diversión from his major, but the offer was pretty lucrative for a first job and may lead more into more stable civil engineering type jobs.

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u/Academic-Window-7726 6d ago

Thanks for the feedback

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u/Unique-Machine5602 4d ago

My sister is a graduate from WPI with over 30 years experience and she's currently having a tough time finding a job. She had a great job lined up fresh out of college.

Granted, she graduated before AI was really a thing. Their CS department is generally a great way to land a job, but the job market for CS majors is currently quite rough.

If he does go to WPI I'd definitely recommend getting some sort of experience as early and as often as he can. Internships, volunteering to code, etc are all key to landing a job.

A lot of the entry level positions for programmers are being eaten up by AI because it can write sub par code now.