<p>I currently attend a large public state school. My GPA should be 3.7-3.8 at graduation and I took the GRE recently (800 Q, 760 V, 5 AW). Senior year will begin this fall and I would like to start applying for grad schools. I am completing a double major in CS and Math and have done no research but have TA'ed for recitation. I would like to apply to top schools for CS and EE such as Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. I will try to get recommendation letters and find research opportunities during fall for robotics and coding. What are my chances at top schools?</p>
<p>The most important thing in your grad school application is your research experience (followed closely by letters of recommendation). Do you have any research up to this point?</p>
<p>@RacinReaver He said he’s done no research (in either math or CS?) but did a TA. </p>
<p>I don’t know much about math/CS programs, but even if you do manage to find a research/lab position this fall, that means you’ll only have a few months by the time you apply. You’ll be competing against people who have years of experience if you apply to the top schools. I’d recommend thinking about applying next year year when you have more experience. Grad school isn’t going anywhere.</p>
<p>If you are talking Master’s I think that your stats will do you fine. If you are talking Phd that is an entire other game. Doing well in math/cs in class isn’t good enough for phd acceptance because it doesn’t show that you can do research and you won’t have the LOR’s frpm professors who agree that you are going to likely be successful in research. Did Well In Class LOR’s are almost meaningless in CS.</p>
<p>For reference, my daughter is in a top 10 CS phd track program and has nowhere near your gpa or gre (still it was good enough it seems) but had research experence nearly every semester and summer from 2nd semester of freshman year(cog sci, physics, math, computing related). I know that makes for a good candidate, a handful of solid acceptances and stills lots of rejections, like to the places you are mentioning. Solid TA experience can also put some points on your application. She was a math/CS major, not double major-- her schools offers an Sc.B in that combination.</p>
<p>What are you doing this summer?</p>
<p>Research experience seems to matter more in some fields than others. Most of the responses you will get here (mine included!) are from people in other fields, and I would encourage you to take our advice with a huge grain of salt.</p>
<p>I am a math major / CS minor and I have spent a lot of time around CS majors. I personally would not be surprised if CS graduate programs didn’t care about research experience per se because CS research does not appear to be fundamentally different from what you might do in course projects or corporate internships. Heck, our professors encourage us to publish course projects and I have also read many publications coming out of commercial product development. </p>
<p>My best friend just got accepted to almost all (except Stanford) CS PhD programs she applied to, as an undergraduate from a top 30 liberal arts college with a below-average CS GRE score and not-terribly-impressive research experience (debugging a simulator her adviser had written and tweaking the constants in the simulation). What she had going for her were letters of recommendations from professors who thought that she was the most talented student that they had met in their teaching career.</p>
<p>I myself just got into top math PhD programs with basically no research experience but glowing letters of recommendation. Your letters of recommendations are probably the single most important element of your graduate application, and it’s impossible to make any sort of admissions prediction without reading your letters.</p>