What to Know About U.S. Computer Science Degrees

Indian national Sujaya Maiyya says she was initially drawn to the University of California—Santa Barbara for its graduate computer science program and its funding for international students pursuing Master of Science degrees.

"After joining the program, I realized how great the department is and I really liked working on distributed systems. I found great advisers here and so shifted to the Ph.D. program," Maiyya says.

At U.S. universities, the number of international graduate applications grew by 6 percent in mathematics and computer sciences between fall 2017 and fall 2018, according to the Council of Graduate Schools. Here are three reasons international students may want to consider earning a graduate degree in computer science at a U.S. university:

Diverse Disciplines

Prospective international students should keep in mind that by studying in the U.S., they will be able to learn about topics ranging from artificial intelligence to web security.

"The best computer scientists – the people who are really on the cutting edge of building the future – work in American universities and companies," says Zvi Galil, dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Galil says the College of Computing has the second-biggest faculty in the U.S. teaching computer science and as a result is able to offer almost a dozen specializations at the master's level.

"Personally, I really like the research environment here. I have been enjoying all the classes I have taken. There is also a constant stream of interesting talks from researchers all over the world," says Xiaojing An, a second-year doctoral student in computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech.

An, who is from China, says her research focuses on graph algorithms on high performance computing platforms.

Matthew Turk, professor and chair of UC—Santa Barbara's Department of Computer Science, says the department has more than 200 graduate students from around the world working toward their M.S. and doctoral degrees, taking advanced courses and publishing papers on their research in top journals and at conferences.

Turk says the department has research labs investigating a range of computer science areas such as machine learning, programming languages and data mining as well as cutting-edge topics in computer security, distributed systems, scientific computing, networking, software engineering, intelligent systems, human-centered computing and more.

Summer Internships

After two semesters of full-time study in the U.S., international students can apply for Curricular Practical Training, or CPT, to pursue summer internships. CPT is a type of work authorization that allows international students to participate in training with an off-campus employer; the work must be a necessary part of the student's degree program and has to be completed before graduation.

Galil says pursuing a computer science graduate degree at a U.S. university allows international students "to connect with American tech employers – and the U.S. tech sector is the largest in the world."

Meena Syamkumar, a sixth-year doctoral student from India in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, has completed summer internships at Cisco and Microsoft. Her research interests are in internet measurements and analysis, cloud computing and software-defined networking.

"Both of my internships were software development roles; they provided me an opportunity to work on deployed software," Syamkumar says.

At Rice University in Texas, recent Master of Computer Science students participated in summer internships at companies like Amazon, LinkedIn, Schlumberger and Tableau, according to the school's website.

Maiyya was a software engineer intern at Google for the last two summers and plans to return this summer. An was a software engineer intern last summer at NVIDIA, headquartered in California, where she learned about speech recognition systems and how research software development works. She plans to intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California this summer.

"At Lawrence Livermore, I will be a graduate student intern and hope to be working on research about graph algorithms that can connect to my dissertation," An says.

Career Prospects

Experts say career prospects in the computer science field are very favorable in the home of tech giants like Facebook, Cisco, Apple and Oracle.

Jobs for computer and information research scientists are expected to grow 19 percent between 2016 and 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – much faster than the 7 percent average growth rate for all occupations.

International students can gain work experience in the U.S. for 12 months under the Optional Practical Training Program, or OPT. Those who earn degrees in science, technology, engineering or math, known as the STEM fields, can apply for the STEM OPT extension, which adds an additional 24 months, for up to 36 months of total work eligibility following graduation.

"A graduate degree opens up many new avenues of possible work for students in industry," says Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, associate chair of the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He says most computer science grads end up within the industry, such as at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple, while some go the academic route and become successful professors at top institutions like the University of California—Berkeley and Cornell University.

An says she plans on sticking with research, either with a competitive research position at a U.S. government or industry research lab or in a faculty position at a U.S. university.

Syamkumar is interested in teaching and plans to pursue a career in academia; she says she already has job offers in the U.S. that she is currently evaluating.

Maiyya has more than three years to go until she graduates from UC—Santa Barbara and is deciding between industry and academia. In the computer science field, she has plenty of options.

"Our graduating students are highly sought after and are recruited by top companies and universities," Turk says.

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