Consider some smaller colleges as well, where there's a chance your professors might learn your name. Olin, for example. Otherwise, had I the chance to go unde

Consider some smaller colleges as well, where there's a chance your professors might learn your name. Olin, for example. Otherwise, had I the chance to go undergrad again, I might go for UCSB CCS. Shameless promo: If you have the option to apply to schools in the UK, I just started a PhD at Imperial, and I'm highly impressed by the undergrads here. They appear to learn Prolog, Haskell and Java in their first year. One built a Haskell EDSL that autocompiles to CUDA as his undergrad thesis - another guy got a summer UROP writing embedded C for a satellite. Last week in the comp. lab I almost stepped on an EeePC some kids had turned into a little autonomous robot. Some 3rd-years were in my lab the other day arguing with a PhD about safety when compiling STM to static locks.