Did I make a mistake?

[Knite]

A while back I was accepted to Carleton for the game development program with a $12k scholarship, but for whatever reason I had never considered UW during the application phase. Now that i'm beginning to take more interest in my education, i've been looking around various CS blogs and forums trying to find out what University is the most renowned for it's CS program(s). Lately all i've seen are discussion about UW, with little or no mention of any other Ontario (or Canadian, for that matter) universities.

Did I make a mistake in choosing Carleton? I really want to get the best education possible, and I fear i've chosen the wrong path. Also, don't jump down my throat about the game design program, as you may know it still merits a general CS degree along with the specialization.

Also, if anybody has any answers to these questions, it would be appreciated:

1) If I were to spend a year at Carleton and i passed all of my courses, would that be worth anything to me if I decided to switch over to UW?

2) What's the co-op placement rate like at UW presently (because of the recession)?

I'm a little unclear on these areas, any help would be appreciated. Thank you

[[Gandalf]]

At least in reference to CompSci.ca, many of the (more vocal) members here are Waterloo students, so I wouldn't take that as a representative measure. There are quite a few top-notch universities for CS in Canada (University of Alberta, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, etc). That said, go where you feel you will develop your skills to their full potential, or simply to the place of your preference. The relationship between the best university for you and the university with the best reputation may not be direct.

1) It would probably be worth something to you personally, at least one would hope. However, a minority of your courses would transfer over. It's always easier to get in right after high school.

2) It's relatively high, especially for CS because of Waterloo's great co-op program. However, it's not as high as 'statistics' might have you believe, especially at present.

[Prabhakar Ragde]

If it makes any difference, there is nothing in the UW CS curriculum specifically on game design. There is plenty of basic computer science that pertains, and game companies want people who are strong in that and not just what some college diploma program (I am not speaking of Carleton's program here) sells as what game companies want.

If you still want to transfer a year from now (please forget about it for at least the first term at Carleton and really put everything into making that work), don't worry about "wasting time" or credits. Every bit of practice is valuable even if you don't get official recognition for it.

It's very difficult to calculate statistics on placement rates for first term co-op right now, because there is a stream that does three terms straight before going out in the fall, and people who were unsuccessful at getting a placement this summer might have switched into it, in which case they wouldn't be counted as "unsuccessful".

[Knite]

Thanks for the replies, I'm going to stick with what I chose and see where I stand next year, a year of studying could prove useful as you've said, and if I do decide to switch to UW or any other school i'll at least be familiar with the university setting and hopefully i'll have learned from any mistakes I might make.

And whether or not UW has a game design stream was never really an issue, in fact i'm not completely sure I want to limit myself by specializing too deeply. However the first year of the game design program i'm in shares all of the same courses as all of the other streams, so I could simply use those credits to pursue another path if I so choose.

Once again, thank you both for your input

[Drew416]

Hi knite, I was in a similar situation as you last year, I never thought about Waterloo and only applied to Universities here in Alberta, after I got in i realized I that waterloo would have been a better option. If you passed all your courses at Carleton and got into Waterloo they would accept some of your courses. For me, in their letter they accepted most of my courses except for 2 absolute joke courses. How many of your courses they accept is gonna vary from uni to uni but as others have said if you really want to go to Waterloo don't worry about how many courses they are giving you credit for or crap like that. The one bad thing about transfer credits is that Waterloo does not give you a grade for those just a credit, which sucks if you get really good grades at Carleton. I was set on going to waterloo until I got a pretty big scholarship offer from my current university earlier this month so I'm no longer going to UW but I was never that enthusiastic about Waterloo anyways, if you still feel strongly about transferring towards the end of your first term then go for it. The transfer process is quite simple... look for it in UW website and one plus is that the AIF form that transfer students have to fill out is a lot less of a hassle then that for hs students. Try getting good grades in your first term as those are the grades the uni would look at (along with your hs grades but you probably have really good hs grades since you got 12k scholarship).