CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards
15 March 2008Peter Lee, head of Computer Science at CMU, has posted an article about undergraduate research awards on his blog: CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. It includes a ranking of schools based on the number of their students who have been recognized by the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards, which is “the most competitive award recognizing extraordinary research potential in undergraduate computer science”. The top four schools are: CMU and University of Washington, with 29 total awards; UVa, with 28 total awards; followed by Berkeley, with 22 total awards. Peter writes,
Looking through the top-25, UW and UVa should feel pretty good about this. We’ve always had the sense that those programs were doing something right, based on how applicants to our Ph.D. program tend to look.
I’m very proud of the recent CRA Awardees in our research group including Adrienne Felt (finalist in 2008, currently on a whirlwind graduate school tour), Salvatore Guarnieri (finalist in 2006, currently a PhD student at the University of Washington), and Jonathan McCune (honorable mentionee in 2003, nearly finished with a PhD at CMU).
I do feel the need to defend my Alma Mater in response to this comment in Peter’s post:
Notably absent from the top-25 are MIT and Stanford. Now, one might try to argue that CRA undergrad awards aren’t indicative of program quality. Perhaps. But given how competitive this is, I would say it is pretty clear that CRA awards show either (a) that faculty are good enough and care enough to get undergrad students involved in high-level research or (b) that faculty care enough to make sure their best students are nominated. Either way, especially in an era when everyone is worried about the CS pipeline (meaning that good departments should be cultivating good young researchers), the best programs simply should have lots of CRA winners.
I don’t know about Stanford, but for MIT the reason definitely is not (a). I was an undergraduate at MIT from 1989-1993, and the faculty there were very committed to involving undergraduates in research and making sure they had a good experience with it. Nearly every student in EECS got some high-level research experience, and at least half the students I knew got involved in a research group within their first year as an undergraduate. (The others often complained that many professors seemed to teach the intro-level courses with the primary goal being to recruit students into their research groups.) MIT estimates that “at least a quarter of EECS undergraduates eventually receive a PhD from some university”, which I suspect is the highest rate of any CS program. If it was possible to produce a table of whose undergraduates eventually become CS professors, I guess MIT would be at the top of that list also. While I was an undergraduate at MIT, I had the privlege of working in research groups led by Marc Raibert and Arvind, both of whom were great influences towards an eventual research career. I was also an undergraduate teaching assistant for John Guttag, who became my graduate research advisor. So, I don’t know why MIT isn’t winning more CRA awards, but it definitely isn’t because the faculty are not doing a great job involving undergraduates in high-level research.
When you visit Peter’s blog, make sure to also check out the hilarious video of Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft from a talk he gave at CMU: Notes from the Bill Gates Visit.