Hi, I am a student from India who applied to the United States for the class of 2019 (undergraduate). I’ve been admitted to Carnegie Mellon, Rice, Washington University in St. Louis, UCLA, USC, UIUC and UC-San Diego. I’m waiting on Cornell and Tufts. I’ve applied for the sciences undecided but hope to either major in Math and/or Computer Science. I am a bit of an all rounder and do not want to focus purely on academics. So which college would be the best fit for me ? Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated !
great ! CMU will be best I think. What are your stats? ACT/SAT score and other credentials?
great ! CMU will be best I think. What are your stats? ACT/SAT score and other credentials?
I have a 1500 CR+Math Score and a 3.8 GPA.
Are there significant differences in the net costs?
If there are, then they are all close enough in quality (for what you want) that you could choose pretty confidently based on cost.
Carnegie Mellon does have an especially strong reputation for CS. For overall undergraduate academic quality, I’d lean toward Rice.
However, it would be very difficult to transfer in to CS if you didn’t apply in to CS at UIUC, CMU, and probably UCLA and UCSD as well. Maybe even Cornell and USC (though possibly not at those 2 schools; you should ask them).
It’s likely much easier to switch your major to CS at the smaller privates Rice, WashU, and Tufts. If costs aren’t an issue, of those schools, I’d choose Rice. Even if you got in everywhere and can switch easily to CS at Cornell & USC, my choice would come down to Rice vs. Cornell.
I can’t really speak to the other schools, but WashU is always touting their academic flexibility. There are engineers with dance minors, psychology majors with second majors in comp sci, and so on. As a student, it was pretty easy to take classes between the five divisions, so it was good for me because I had interests in a bunch of areas. I saw a lot of engineers (comp sci is in engineering) taking business courses or double majoring in business, or students taking architecture classes for fun. Typically, each major or minor declared at WashU gets you a separate adviser (in addition to your main academic adviser).
My decision has come down to Rice vs CMU. I have also considered engineering in addition to math and computer science. So any new feedback would be welcomed!