CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards
The Computing Research Association (CRA) announced last December the recipients of the 2008 Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. We did well again, with two of our students, Henry DeYoung and Evan Hoke being named as finalists. The CRA each year picks one or two men and one or two women as Outstanding Undergraduates of the Year. In addition, they recognize several runner-ups, finalists, and honorable mentions. This is the most competitive award recognizing extraordinary research potential in undergraduate computer science.
Tom Horton of the University of Virginia has put together a nice spreadsheet, forwarded to me by Ed Lazowska of the University of Washington. The spreadsheet lists the CRA winners since 1999. Well, Ed is really pleased with the list, as am I (and I’ll bet Tom is, too), because CMU, UW, and UVa come out looking really good. Here is the list of the top 25 schools, ranked by total number of CRA undergraduate awards:
| Total CRA Awards | School | Winners | Runner Ups | Finalists | Honorable Mentions |
| 29 | Carnegie Mellon University | 2 | 2 | 5 | 20 |
| 29 | University of Washington | 2 | 2 | 4 | 21 |
| 28 | University of Virginia | 0 | 0 | 2 | 26 |
| 22 | University of California | 0 | 1 | 2 | 19 |
| 20 | University of British Columbia | 0 | 1 | 1 | 18 |
| 18 | Brown University | 0 | 1 | 2 | 15 |
| 16 | Harvard University | 0 | 2 | 4 | 10 |
| 15 | University of Texas | 0 | 0 | 3 | 12 |
| 14 | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | 0 | 0 | 2 | 12 |
| 13 | Harvey Mudd College | 0 | 1 | 1 | 11 |
| 13 | Dartmouth College | 2 | 0 | 0 | 11 |
| 13 | Columbia University | 0 | 0 | 3 | 10 |
| 13 | University of Waterloo | 0 | 1 | 2 | 10 |
| 12 | University of Rochester | 1 | 0 | 1 | 10 |
| 11 | Drexel University | 1 | 0 | 2 | 8 |
| 11 | Cornell University | 2 | 1 | 1 | 7 |
| 8 | Purdue University | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 |
| 7 | University of Maryland | 0 | 1 | 0 | 6 |
| 7 | Princeton University | 2 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| 6 | Mississippi State University | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| 6 | Texas A&M University | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| 6 | Duke University | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| 6 | University of Delaware | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| 6 | California Institute of Technology | 1 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| 6 | University of California | 0 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
As you can see, CMU and UW are ranked #1 in terms of total number of students recognized. CMU, UW, Darmouth, Cornell, and Princeton have the most CRA undergraduate award winners, with two each. CMU also has the most runners-up and finalists, and is third in honorable mentions.
Not bad, especially considering how small our program is.
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. Similarly for, say, Harvey Mudd College (ranked #9) and Harvard (ranked #11), whose high rankings are impressive when considering the small size of their programs.
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.
To see a more complete list of student award winners in our program, see the SCS Student Awards page.
I should conclude this article by saying a little bit about the CRA (Computing Research Association). The CRA does a lot of great things for the computing research community, ranging from running major groups such as CRA-W (which promotes the cause of women in computer science), to organizing committees such as CRA Government Affairs (which provides in-depth analysis of federal investments in computing research), to overseeing community proxy organizations such as the Computing Community Consortium (which provides support for developing new visions for future funding programs), to producing the annual Taulbee Survey. Our department pays an annual membership fee to the CRA, and we’ve traditionally had a strong presence on the CRA Board of Directors, with me as a current member and Randy Bryant, Jeannette Wing, and many others before me. The various award programs conducted by the CRA turn out to have particularly high impact, and perhaps none more so than the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards.
Peter Lee @ February 24, 2008
[…] 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 […]
[…] an excellent blog post by CMU Computer Science Department chair Peter Lee here. September 15, […]
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