Hi Everyone,
Can you please let me know which if DS should apply for CS or CE
Asian Male
In State
SAT 1500 (800 Math, 700 English)
Weighted GPA 5.6190 (out of a 5.0 scale)
Unweighted GPA 4.9050
Multiple PLTW courses (Princ of Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Eng Design and Development) - All A’s
6 APs by the end of Senior year
Taking Advanced Math Topic which is a Calculus 3 course offered by UIUC in conjunction with his high school.
ECs
Chess Club
Math Club
Co President of Comp Science Club
TA for AP Comp Science (1 semester Junior Year)
Volleyball
Boys Scout who is completing his Eagle Scout Project
150 volunteer hours in Africa (summer before Junior year)
Please let me know if you need any additional info.
Hey there,
Current CE major here - I think that in general, top engineering schools, particularly public schools, are far more numbers-oriented than other programs. This means that such programs are more strict about numbers, but less so about ‘wishy-washy’ details mostly unrelated to academics. Bottom line, I’d say what’s important are strong scores, especially in math/science, and to a somewhat lesser degree, demonstrated interest.
As far as these factors go, he looks like a viable candidate for either, but ECE is slightly easier to get into than CS. That being said, CompE has its overlaps with CS, but still has significant differences - so at the end of the day, it’s about interest. They both are pretty equivalent for many fields, but sometimes, coursework can be redundant based on field of interest. Even with the slight difficulties in admissions difficulty, they’re negligible enough that the differences would be mostly washed over by pseudo-random nature of competitive admissions itself, so it’s probably more important to select by interest rather than admissions difficulty.