Chance Me: ECE or CS?

Colleges and Universities A-Z The University of Texas at Austin
1

Asian

  • SAT: 1450, I hope to improve in August.
  • GPA: (on a 6 scale) W: 5.29, UW: 3.88 (DM me if this seems a little confusing, ik it’s stupid)
  • Rank: 16/400 (top 4%)
  • APs: all 4s and 5s: WHAP, APCSP, eng/comp, APUSH, Chem, Stats, Euro, hope to take Physics C, Calc BC, AP lit, APCS, AP macro/gov in Senior year

Activities:

  • Built a computer in 7th grade
  • 2 years of robotics, mainly on software, software lead for past year and into senior year. Got to World Champs (but didn’t win lol) 3 years ago.
  • Internship with a UTCS database professor over the summers for the past 2 years. Hopefully work is published in a paper soon.
  • UIL Academics: Math (team ranked 2nd regionals one year), Comp Sci (participated in some coding competitions such as CodeWars and Code Quest as well)
  • Open source contributions: Hotbot (a discord bot written in Kotlin), hand coded a website to centralize student academic information for my district, and other numerous but very small programs (<100 lines) for cs and some school projects.

Skills:

  • programming languages: Java, python, labview
  • shells: proficient with cmd and bash
  • proficient in git
  • IDEs: IDLE, netbeans, eclipse, intellij idea, visual studio code, vim
  • matplot.lib.py, bumpy, scipy, Selenium for Java

Awards:

  • AP Student Scholar
  • some UIL place rankings
  • Deans list semi finalist for robotics
  • rookie all star award for robotics
  • small math comp award in 7th grade

Rec letters: The UT professor (hope that had a lot of impact) and the UIL math coach at my school.

Essays: haven’t written them yet but I hope to write about how my rank/gpa got screwed because I moved from Cali to Texas (for the rep gpa question). Also hoping to talk a lot about the internship.

Based on this, do you think my stats are more competitive for putting CS or ECE as a #1 choice for college apps? UT admissions people say they really only look at your #1 choice, so it needs to be best tailored to my stats. ECE has a larger class size (1500 vs ~ 500) so I was thinking of putting that as #1 since CS is virtually impossible to get into lol. What would be my chances for ECE (or even CS lol)?

2

I’m instate too.

3

Your skills are great! There’s a lot of overlap in computers. In fact, most CS and a lot of EE graduates end up getting good IT jobs and never look at a math problem their entire career. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just put down the major that interests you most. If you get the other one, you’ll probably be fine. One thing to keep in mind with UT, is that they’re snooty with their computer/engineering programs. I would add Texas A&M and a couple of other schools as back-ups just in case.

4

@ILikeGoodGrades My DS was a CS /ECE double major. He has said that ECE is the harder degree to get. If you start there and then pick up the CS degree, you’ll have no problem with the CS courses. Also, our anecdotal experience has been that engineering seems to have more money to give in terms of scholarships. They don’t happen often but, they are a possibility. (Again, just our experience)
Either way, you’ll have lots of job opportunities. Good luck!

5

It’s true that CS is more difficult to get into than ECE, but honestly not by that much. Overall however, you seem like a decent applicant for CS and strong applicant for ECE. What is your SAT Math subscore?

6

It was 750; the June test screwed me up when I only got 2 questions wrong. Hopefully this upcoming one yields a better math sub score (780+)