<p>I'm having trouble deciding where to apply. Recently I've fallen in love with programming, but my ECs back up linguistics a lot better. I'm interested in both, but they're often offered at different colleges. I know a lot of people change their major in college, and I find it stressful to have to choose which college to apply to within a university. How can I get into a university for computer science with little background and how can I incorporate linguistics? Where is a good place to start looking? (RI resident, 3.75 UW GPA, 4.35 W GPA, 2200 SAT)</p>
<p>Have a look at Swarthmore. Very strong departments in both linguistics and CS.</p>
<p>Thanks, I’ll look into it 
Right now the universities I’m interested in applying to are Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, NYU, URI, and URochester.</p>
<p>CS doesn’t have that much to do with coding and linguistics doesn’t have that much to do with knowing how to speak foreign languages. Pretty much nothing in HS prepares you for either subject as it’s taught at a decent university (definitely not AP CS) so don’t at all feel boxed in.</p>
<p>Also, your prospective major will be less of a factor for liberal arts-oriented schools (Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth) and more of a factor for the land-grant institutions (Cornell, URI). URochester will likely fall somewhere in between. So, don’t stress about it any more than the application requires you to stress about it.</p>
<p>In general, if you feel anxiety about either subject, look at the courses offered by the departments you’re looking at, read over the syllabi, get a feel for the subject, what the general sequence is, common terminology, etc. You’re not expected to know the entire subject going in, but if you have a decent idea of what the subject is, you’re ahead of the game. You’d be surprised how many Harvard econ majors get mad because they can’t take finance or marketing classes for credit. They didn’t understand the field they were getting into. If you can, you’ll be in good shape.</p>
<p>For combining the two fields, the phrase you want to google in “computational linguistics”. Lot of interesting work to be done.</p>
<p>fyi my daughter did CS at Brown and had no background except for strong math aptitude. She was studying other things when she took their famous CS017/018 sequence. The open curriculum will help you with a double major. MIT is another schools strong at both if you want more reaches. A double major may be challenging. UMass Amherst if you want more safeties, their CS is well regarded and the grad school is very strong in linguistics so I imagine the undergrad program is good.</p>