[My experience & Guide] UT Turing Scholars Class of 2024

Colleges and Universities A-Z The University of Texas at Austin
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This is not really a comprehensive guide, but I hope it’s useful enough to get y’all interested in TURING SCHOLARS!!!

[ABOUT TURING SCHOLARS]
The CS Honors route - Turing Scholars- allows you to take 3 semesters of UT CS- which is already hard- in just 2 semesters, which allows you to take harder classes later on. Being a Turing Scholar means that you also are expected to conduct research/write a graduate-level thesis and do internships in college and are given smaller class sizes.

[BENEFITS AFTER GRADUATION]

  1. You already probably have more internships than other UT CS or internships of higher quality
  2. You've written a MASTERs thesis already.
  3. This is the one I can't put concrete numbers on but it's a super amazing thing to put on a resume. Obviously people who don't know what UT is won't know about it, but UT is a HUGE school!!! Admittedly, I live in the Austin area, but all of my teachers knew what the Turing Scholar program was and were really impressed that I was accepted to the program. People even talk about me at the other school, they're like it's that dude that was accepted to the Turing Scholar's program.

[SUMMARY]
So being a Turing Scholar is really grueling, but it’s payoff is way higher than an already very high UTCS payoff.

[MY STORY]

I was contacted by Calvin Lin early January regarding my application, where he asked me to set up an interview on Skype or in person. Since I lived close enough to him, I went down to UT in person and we had a technical interview. I won’t spoil the interview prompt because he asked me specifically not to, but it was a challenging problem that required quite a bit of thinking. A couple of weeks later, I received an email saying that my MyStatus was updated and then I was accepted!

  • See y’all at >goto_Turing in 2020!

My Stats:
SAT 2 Math 2 - 800
SAT Math- 800
4.0 GPA
I took AP CSP and CSA and got 5s on both of them.

These are obviously highlights, I didn’t do nearly as well in EBRW or my other subject test. But I had the base-level knowledge of

  1. How to code
  2. What makes coding efficient (Big O notation)
  3. Thinking somewhat outside of the box.

I hope this helped with y’alls college search at UT, and what you can expect from the Turing Scholar’s program from now on.

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Your stories?

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