Changing Majors in College [Now Wanting CS Masters]

Graduate School
1

<p>Hello,</p>

<p>I'm currently going to be a 3rd year at Cal, and my GPA is around (3.85-3.86). However, my dilemma is after my 1st year at Cal, I transferred from another Engineering discipline into EECS (CS-focus) so I am a bit behind in my course load and am taking a noncompetitive schedule compared with my peers because I had to play a great amount of catch-up. Prior to college, I had no exposure to programming as I came from a small city with no mention of CS in most high school curriculums. However, I now spend the majority of my time in academics doing CS-related activities as I finished my other required courses in EE/Physics/Math/Humanities. Hence, I was able to land an internship this summer at a decently known company doing CS work.</p>

<p>My question is that what kind of grad school can I even expect to attend if I'm behind in my coursework but am still doing well in my classes?</p>

<p>I understand that letter of recs and research play a large role in getting into a graduate school, but I don't expect to be able to start getting intimately involved in research until the 2nd Semester of my junior year as I feel that I have not taken enough CS classes to be considered for one in the 1st Semester atleast. How bad is this?</p>

<p>Will grad schools even care that I changed majors? </p>

<p>Thanks for taking the time to read this :)</p>

2

<p>Uh…I assume you can only graduate when you finish all your required courses, so why is it a problem that you are behind right now? Maybe you’ll need to take an extra semester or two to finish, but you won’t be going to grad school before you finish undergrad, so being behind shouldn’t matter.</p>

<p>Research doesn’t really matter for MS CS admissions. It can help your app stand out, and certain programs may be more partial to it, but you won’t be denied anywhere for having zero research done. If you want a PhD, then basically the complete opposite of what I just said.</p>