<p>Okay, So I am a Junior in highschool.
my GPA is 3.40 UW/ 3.60 W
My ACT score is a 25 across the Board
Participated in Policy Debate and Acting and Took a leadership role for debate for a year
I worked at my School's tech center (Computer support specialist)
Chorus
I took a good sum of Honors classes. Only 2 AP classes though.
Both Computer Science (got a 4 on the AP exams)
Took German for 2 years if that means anything</p>
<p>I looked at forums for the best universities; but most of them are the elite schools (Harvard, MIT, Princeton)
I looked at San jose university, university of Illinois - champagne and University of Washington - Seattle (dream school) (All three are on my radar)
University of Kentuky is a last resort</p>
<p>Comments? (nothing rude please, we're not all gods like you are)</p>
<p>suggestions? (universities. etc...)</p>
<p>any missing info I can provide?</p>
<p>thank you! :)</p>
<p>What are your parents saying about how much they’ll pay? you have OOS publics on your list and they will expect you to pay most/all of the costs.</p>
<p>what is your home state?</p>
<p>So here is my take - In very broad general terms…your school won’t matter. Unless you were to go to one of the most elite techie/computer schools (Stanford, Carnegie Mellon…that kind of thing), the choice of schools for this field is far secondary to getting some experience doing something within the field and just having a degree. </p>
<p>What we look for most when hiring Computer Programmers is real world experience. So my advice to any student looking at an IT field is to find a place where you can get something that can be real experience.</p>
<p>On my team where I work as a Programmer, there are four people who went through Community Colleges. Three went on to get 4 year degrees from regional state schools and one went to Washington University - St. Louis after CC One of my co-workers has no degree at all, but self taught himself COBOL 35 years ago and is still around but about to retire…Two of us went to Flagship State Universities and two more went to private Liberal Arts Colleges. I tell you this because there are a lot of posts on this group where kids seem to think that if they don’t get into Stanford or MIT, then their life will be a complete failure and that is really not the case at all. </p>
<p>My company has been ranked by Forbes as one of the top ten places to work every year for the last decade and I’d be willing to bet there aren’t a dozen programmers who went to Stanford and MIT combined out of maybe 1000 IT professionals we have in the firm. I’m sure we would hire them if they were available and were a good fit, but we look at all kinds of educational backgrounds and when I interview I almost don’t even notice the person’s school any more as long as they have some sort of IT degree - I do, however, look at their experience and comfort level with different technologies.</p>
<p>Find a school where you can learn and get some experience and hopefully not build up so much debt that your salary is halved for the first 10 years of your professional career. </p>
<p>Completely agree with Stan.
Don’t be worried about going to the “best universities” - there are opportunities everywhere.
S’ high school stats were similar to yours and he recently graduated from a small private university. No wide-ranging name recognition and not especially highly ranked.
However, it was a great fit for him and a wonderful place to spend four years.
He just started working at a high tech international firm, with a great starting salary.
He interviewed for one job and wound up being hired for another, several levels higher.
In addition to his required coursework, he also spent plenty of time learning other pertinent info on his own.
Best of luck!.</p>
<p>Great advice! I guess your right, my dream is to work at Google. the analysis behind my conclusion of a good computer science program will lead to an elite job. Going to a good college would prove that I understand the material, and learned from the best. thus improving the quality of work to the company and being a great asset to them. Also, I was wondering how I would be able to be an internship job in this field, or at least a computer support specialist. (millions of people out there, I know) But I need some hands on experience in the field. Finally, I wanted to ask; does getting your masters make a substantial difference in the computer science field? or am I just wasting extra money on a degree that will gain no more traction than I already would have with a bachelors degree.</p>
<p>thanks for your input everyone!!!</p>
<p>***sorry for the bad grammer and run on sentences, its almost midnight here. haha</p>
<p>Google and other large companies recruit widely.</p>
<p>A master’s degree is not really necessary for most industry jobs.</p>
<p>With respect to selecting a school, consider these two points:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Make sure that you know the difference between CS versus CIS/MIS/IT/etc. majors. CS prepares you to design and develop computers and their software, while CIS/MIS/IT/etc. (usually housed in a business division) prepares you to manage computers and their software.</p></li>
<li><p>Check CS departments’ course offerings. If you are going to school to learn CS, make sure that the school has sufficient CS offerings, since some smaller schools have CS departments that are too small to offer the full set of advanced CS courses.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Of course, you will need to consider admission selectivity and affordability in order to come up with a realistic application list.</p>
<p>Since I want to do Computer Systems Analyst. With that in mind, any specific majors I should do? I did some research and found that CS trains individuals to do that type of work. But, you seem more qualified on this front and have had more hands on life experience with that. </p>
<p>Tuition and finacial aid are not problems for me. So, any good colleges within the majors you suggest that are good enough to earn my degree available to me?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>*****the official job name is: Online Information Security and Assurance Degrees</p>
<p>I’ve done petty hacking when I was younger.</p>
<p>Getting scammers email address and password using .NET framework and so forth and getting payback for being the people they are in society. </p>
<p>off topic, sorry.</p>
<p>Main point, I want to ethically hack as my career. If I can get a degree that teaches me skills like this, then I am set.</p>
<p>In agreement with all that is posted here about industry. CS is all about what can you do and what have you done than what school did you go to. It’s practicality at its finest, which is good for a student who doesn’t live in an academic bubble.</p>
<p>Suggestion: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. It will get you an amazing technical knowledge and skill base, and it would be a low reach for you where some of the other tech schools are pretty tough for your stats.</p>
<p>In general, the tech EC’s will be looked upon fondly by IT and PI universities. Check some of them out.</p>
<p>Missing info to provide: More info about college preferences like location, size, social scene.</p>
<p>A higher reach school: Worcester Polytechnic Institute for many of the same reasons </p>
<p>Try to do internships while you have the college resources no matter where you go. Experience is key.</p>
<p>Any Internship jobs I should apply for? I don’t have any qualifications. All I have is my personal experience. ANd yes! i will add those two colleges to my list!!</p>
<p>thank you!!</p>
<p>If you want a smaller school, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology looks like it may be an automatic admission safety for you with a 25 ACT (with 25 math) and >2.0 HS GPA with the specified high school curriculum (which includes a year of fine art): <a href=“Admissions Requirements”>http://www.sdsmt.edu/Admissions/Apply/Admissions-Requirements/</a> .</p>
<p>It is also relatively low cost, even for out-of-state students: <a href=“Full Time Undergraduate Students”>HPC Page;
<p>I’ll keep that as a last resort! thank you for the suggestion.</p>
<p>A high school tech internship is hard to get, you really have to get it through connections. For college, look for jobs like what you want to be beyond college. The resources to look will be there at most colleges.</p>
<p>In terms of having no qualifications, your personal experience will do wonders. If you can bring in a project to an interview that you made, that can show what you are capable of. If you are into coding / the CS route, you will also encounter the “white board” interview, where they will literally ask you to write code to solve a problem during the interview. This is where you can shine regardless of what you look like on paper. If you are capable, you will have no problems with lack of qualifications (for internships while in school anyways).</p>
<p>Awesome, thank you for the feedback. I’m somewhat into programming, Not the best at it though. So,ill just try to improve my own experience.</p>
<p>Can you tell us what state you are in? Are you saying that your parents will pay any amount, even up to
k for a private or the OOS rates for some of the publics? </p>
<p>There is a wide range of colleges private and public that Google and other companies recruit from. You can look at where Google’s offices are located and see a lot of college towns you can be sure they recruit at. Some colleges publish which companies recruited in recent years. But there are many other companies than Google. @ucbalumnus has been saying this for a long time but I just really internalized it when my daughter was interviewing and ended up somewhere completely unexpected when an opportunity came that she hadn’t forseen. So realize that there are many interesting things that you don’t even know about yet. Don’t gear your education to one job title that you have seen.</p>
<p>A CS degree is very broad based and will prepare you for a number of directions. You can specialize a bit by taking electives in Information security and cryptography, say. Or, there are more specialized degrees like software engineering, game development, CS security at some colleges. But you don’t really need to do that. That might be too specialized. To do information security from the technical side you still need to start with CS basics such as computer architecture and operating systems, programming languages, software engineering and you would add computer networking and any specific security classes your college offers. Then you target that when you look for jobs. My daughter interned at Google in the Security dept after she got her BS in math-CS and when she was getting a master’s in machine learning. Google generally looks for generalists when they hire interns.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about if you should get a Master’s now. It is too early to decide. There is nothing wrong with working first and your employer may pay it, or you may find that you want to specialize ant go for it. You can think about that after you are older and wiser.</p>
<p>So how far are you in math and what do your grades look like in math? To be honest I don’t think you will get into UW or UIUC with your gpa, and if you aren’t a direct admit to CS at UW it can be hard to transfer in, you might not get to major in CS, they do have related majors but it is competitive. Maybe it is better to go with a sure thing, or to go to a branch campus if there is any transfer avenue but you still have the CS option if you can’t transfer (have to check this, just a thought if you are in Washington.)</p>
<p>Anyway I didn’t mean to write this much. But just add, the 2 years of German are important because at least 2 years foreign language is a requirement for many colleges.</p>
<p>Also it is late to look for HS internship programs for this year. But you can explore online open source projects/problems. Through your college years too. I don’t know if you have skills to contribute yet but you can be aware and check it out.</p>
<p>make sure the school is ABET accredited 
You might want to check out SUNY stonybrook, Bama, Umass- Amherst, Penn State, Ohio State, ASU, BU, Northeastern, UToronto…</p>
<p>ABET accreditation in CS is generally considered sufficient, but not necessary, to indicate a good quality CS major. Of non-ABET-accredited CS majors, there are some very good ones (e.g. Stanford, CMU, L&S CS at Berkeley), but there are also some very poor ones (where there are too few advanced CS courses offered).</p>
<p>ABET accreditation in CS may be specifically relevant if you want to take the patent exam.</p>
<p>Yes and yes. I live in Illinois and get a discount since my parents work at northwestern. Half my tuition cost is paid by northwestern to any other school I go to outside of northwestern. 90% for northwestern. I am very strong in algebra. Got an 97% as my average. Geometry is iffy. I can do well in it, but I can’t think too abstractly. I’m more concrete. Truthfully, I am open to all opportunities CS can give me. It’s just works well with me. Technical, logical and concrete. (From what I have seen) </p>
<p>Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has a major in Computing Security - <a href=“Department of Computing Security | Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences | RIT”>http://www.rit.edu/gccis/computingsecurity/</a> - and it’s a co-op school so you’ll get real world experience.</p>
<p>If money is no object, you might have a shot at Pace, in NYC. Since they are within walking distance of Wall Street, there are loads of internship opportunities with financial firms. There are many small start-ups in Lower Manhattan, also. NJ Institute of Technology is right across the river, and is probably a match for you. With your current stats, UC Santa Cruz might be a bit of a reach, but it’s not out of the question. See if someone can calculate your UC weighted GPA for you - they have a unique system: you need at least a UC-weighted 3.4 if you’re from out of state. It would be a perfect school for you, though, because they’re within an hour from Silicon Valley, and even have a satellite campus in the Valley. San Jose State is another popular destination, but their computer department might be more selective. </p>
<p>So, which one would you pick personally? Santa Cruz or Pace? pace seems less selective and less rigorous. (bad assumption?) Or should I just stay local?</p>