Computer science offers: St. Andrew vs Edinburgh?

Hi, I just got two offers from St. Andrew’s and Edinburgh. I am an international student. Could you please help me to choose between these two offers?

Reply 1

mesub

Original post by Liubin

Hi, I just got two offers from St. Andrew’s and Edinburgh. I am an international student. Could you please help me to choose between these two offers?

Think about the two universities and what they can offer you. Which one stands out to you more? What's the course like? Do you think you'll fit in well there?

Just some starting points for you to ponder over.

Reply 2

amimnesko

Edinburgh has strong courses in AI and Natural Language Processing (in conjunction with their highly-ranked linguistics department), but what's more defining about them are their niche courses in Theoretical Computing Science, Programming Language Theory, High-Performance Computing, and so on. According to my friend who went to St. Andrews, they're much more focused on practical skills and training people up for software engineering work, but since the less-skilled layer of software engineering careers are already being made redundant by LLM automation, there's a strong argument for going somewhere that can verse you in more advanced theory that can be applied to work in fields like formal verification or compiler optimisation.

The main problem with Edinburgh seems to be eccentric professors who think their own research is more important than marking your work.

You can read Edinburgh's degree programme here, and St. Andrews' here.