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SWE Job-Hunting Friendly Schools/Programs

Having personally gone through both the domestic (China) fall recruiting season and the US internship search, and having mentored some students on finding US internships, here are some personal observations of job-hunting friendly schools/programs based on data points around me (this is only about job-hunting friendliness, not admission threshold. I've also considered whether I've observed enough data points — for example, MIT CS grads obviously do well in job hunting, but I don't know many MIT CS undergrads, so it's not listed here).

  1. Gatech MSCS/CSE: My personal impression is that Gatech has a solid landing rate. The MSCS students I've observed have done well in job hunting — many have landed at both Meta and Amazon.
  2. Stanford CS/EE: I know quite a few who landed offers even without internships. For F (Meta), the Stanford students I know can basically all get NVIDIA interviews. A friend even received a department-wide NVIDIA recruiting email, applied, and got an interview scheduled within thirty minutes — comparable to the speed of scheduling interviews in China.
  3. UW EE PMP/HCI: This program is, in my opinion, severely underrated. Although it ranks B- on Open CS, I think its job-hunting friendliness deserves an A+. Friends in this program have basically felt no difference between EE and CS when job hunting. Many EE PMP students can get Meta and Amazon interviews. EE PMP also offers co-op, and in 2023, Amazon picked up roughly 10% of UW EE PMP students. Moreover, UW EE PMP's co-op doesn't require extending graduation (e.g., if you enroll Fall 2024, you can intern August-November 2025 without delaying graduation). Very suitable for job hunting. You can choose all software courses and skip hardware courses. UW HCI is harder to get into, but also offers a six-month internship — you only need to take 10 credits on campus.
  4. UCSD: Both CS75 and ECE are job-hunting friendly. CS75 course difficulty allows you to pick easy courses so you don't put pressure on yourself during recruiting season. ECE has co-op. UCSD is also an NVIDIA target school.
  5. NEU: Job-hunting friendly — whether it's CS Align, MSCS, or IS, all offer co-op. Also a LinkedIn target school.
  6. CMU: Based on the data points I've observed, HR doesn't really care about which college you're in — as long as you're at CMU, they assume you study CS. Plenty of people from the business school have landed at big tech companies too. INI/SCS landing rates are also solid — a friend told me it's roughly 2/3. Companies like Snowflake and Databricks specifically recruit at CMU. If you've taken a DB course, they'll collect resumes and schedule interviews. In 2025, many INI and SCS new grads landed at Databricks and Snowflake.
  7. UT Austin ECE/MSCS: ECE is also very job-friendly, mainly because you can extend graduation and it has co-op — you can do a full-time internship during the semester. There's almost no peer pressure. The ECE SES track has fewer than ten people per cohort. In Fall 2023 summer, 7 people nearly all landed.