All I can say is, make a list of places and go visit.
I ended up at a (very) small private school about 400mi away. When I visited, the head of the CS department talked with me in his office for over an hour. From that conversation, I learned:
A) He is completely brilliant and extremely competent
B) He teaches about half of the upper-level CS courses
C) His dissertation was in an area that strongly interested me
After that it was a no-brainer. Obviously, going to a smaller, lesser-known school, I don't stand out as much on a resume. But at the "good companies", it matters more what you've done with your spare time than where you went to school.
Turns out other competent people also followed my line of reasoning. My first year there, I found two cofounders for a startup. So not only do I have a good mentor (at least as far as the tech part goes), but we all get some leeway on assignments if we were up until 1am adding a new feature to our codebase.
I really didn't like the attitude of the larger schools where they would have an associate professor who teaches CS1 talk to you about computer games. I realize that profs like him are unusual. That's why I chose the school.
I ended up at a (very) small private school about 400mi away. When I visited, the head of the CS department talked with me in his office for over an hour. From that conversation, I learned:
A) He is completely brilliant and extremely competent
B) He teaches about half of the upper-level CS courses
C) His dissertation was in an area that strongly interested me
After that it was a no-brainer. Obviously, going to a smaller, lesser-known school, I don't stand out as much on a resume. But at the "good companies", it matters more what you've done with your spare time than where you went to school.
Turns out other competent people also followed my line of reasoning. My first year there, I found two cofounders for a startup. So not only do I have a good mentor (at least as far as the tech part goes), but we all get some leeway on assignments if we were up until 1am adding a new feature to our codebase.