CS Admissions Difficulty

Parents Forum
21

@cmsjmt It’s a bit disingenuous to say Steve Ballmer majored in math at Harvard. They didn’t have a CS major when he attended. All the CS courses were in Applied Math at the time. The CS department was created at some point in the 80s after brother #1 graduated and brother #2 started.

Nothing wrong with not liking CMU - it’s very intensely nerdy. My older son loved it, (and Caltech too, but didn’t get in), but he’s a 100% computer geek. He loved hanging around the Linux cluster playing board games and Magic or talking about video games, sci fi and the latest graphic novels. You can have a much more well-rounded and less pre-professional experience at another school. A very large portion of the undergrads at CMU (not just in CS) know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. It has a different vibe from places like Tufts or Harvard.

Tufts admits separately for engineering which is a very small school within the university - you can do CS either through engineering or through Arts and Sciences

As I said before - I have no problem with reach heavy lists as long as there are two safeties. (So you have a choice in April.) I am not a fan of ED, but I think students should apply EA to every school that offers it (and they shouldn’t squander EA on Single choice EA programs). Many state schools have rolling admissions and the earlier you apply to them the better. The best safety school is the one you get into early. U of Chicago was my younger son’s safety school after he got in early. (He hadn’t seen it, and didn’t know how much he’d like it, but was able to drop a safety school that was much less selective and bigger than he wanted.)

22

Re: bar being somewhat higher for CS majors:

That would probably vary by school. It may very well be at Stanford or Princeton. I doubt it is at Yale or Northwestern.

Lot’s of lemmings out there.

23

Brown is not a lesser-known school for CS. It’s well known as a top school.

This kid is going to be competing, at top schools, with a lot of other boys just like him, unfortunately. He’s got the numbers, but since he has no hook, I agree with other posters who suggested casting a wide net.

My nephew, who had similar stats, ended up rejected at all his reaches, and will be a happy freshman at Santa Clara next fall.

24

Grade distributions for Berkeley courses can be found at:
https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/courses/FL/2015/320/
For L&S CS, the prerequisites are CS 61A, 61B, 61C, 70, and Math 1A, 1B, 54 (1A and 1B can be covered with a 5 on AP calculus BC). Students bringing in substantial frosh/soph level CS transfer credit from other schools are more likely to get subject credit for CS 61B than the other courses. The CS course home pages can be found at http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html .

Note also that EECS has additional science (mainly physics) requirements; the breadth requirements are also different between the engineering and L&S divisions.

A Regents’ scholarship for someone with no financial need (which sounds like the case) is $2,500.

25

Of course, there are plenty of schools that have good CS but are somewhat less selective (even if they admit by major with CS being a harder major to be admitted to) so that he may be able to put them in the low match or safety category.

26

I don’t think being a white male will hold him back at all especially with those fab stats. But then again, most applying to engineering have those great stats. I had a daughter applying last year (attending this fall) and we thought she was getting in just ahead of the curve, hearing all the cries for women in engineering - we were certain it would be a big advantage. However, the cries were more about women in the workforce, and I was told schools saw a significant rise in applications from females, so even being a girl has quickly lost its perceived advantage. Frankly there’s just a lot applying to CS - both males & females - with all the advertising of demand. I have two doing CS within engineering at schools on the west coast because that is where they want to work and live - and both schools have great connections to industry. Rankings are just another place to find data, here is a recent list of some top west coast CS schools:

http://news.yahoo.com/best-computer-science-engineering-schools-182955632.html

(I don’t recall seeing if he is looking for a certain part of the country…)

I would give a lot of thought to the size of the program, public v. private, and do the engineering CS department tours. We had a tour that ended up being a great influence, we had no idea the school had so much to offer till we did the tour and compared it to the others. They get old, but can be worth the time.

27

[QUOTE=""]
Take a school like Berkeley. As an OOS candidate with his stats, his family has it as a “low reach”. But for a male applying as a CS major (EECS actually), I’d almost certainly call it a “high reach”.

Take another school like Univ. Illinois Urbana Champaign. He’s OOS; his family has it as a “low match / match”. But I’m worried that as a CS major (Engineering) it might be a “high match” or even a “low reach”. Ditto for schools like Georgia Tech, RPI, etc.

[/QUOTE]

Your nephew’s statistics match GT and RPI, but you’ll need to make sure he doesn’t go to “numbers jail.” Numbers jail is for people who rely solely on high test scores and GPAs to get them into college. Ask him to mention his desire to study CS, identify any research areas of interest (and possibly faculty with whom he is interested in working), and his ability to finish on time (4 years) in his statement of purpose–especially with state schools like GT.

If your nephew mentions interest in an important-but-undersubscribed area like scientific computing and identifies research groups/faculty, this will increase his chances considerably. A lot of prospective CS majors put themselves in danger by coming across as people who want to become technicians (who ought to enroll in a two-year program instead). Try not to do that.

Saturation problems exist for those who want to major in Netbeans, write slow code, or who don’t want to think.

28

UIUC CS is likely a reach to high reach for anybody. Not a match at all.

29

I haven’t read the entire discussion, so I’ll just say what I know about my own college.

I go to Carnegie Mellon. For admissions here, the applicant applies to the particular ‘college(s)’ in CMU- there’s Dietrich humanities, Mellon college of science, fine arts, etc. So, the computer science college DOES have different admissions than everything else and the admissions rates do change significantly from one college to another. I’m a student in Dietrich, which has about a 24% acceptance rate, while CS has about 5% and the Information Systems program (Which is basically a mixture of lighter CS and business) has about a 12% acceptance rate. For CS admissions at a school with this kind of differentiation when applying, I would not say that being male would necessarily ‘hurt’ his chances, but being female does tend to give a leg up since the majority of applicants are male.

CS at CMU is, obviously, very hard to get into. I have friends who did not get into CS, but did get into engineering, who had shown tremendous interest in CMU, had perfect math scores, good grades, etc. CMU’s CS department has theoretical leanings, so they don’t necessarily look for CS experience as much as they look for aptitude with problem-solving. Something like 30% of the incoming CS freshmen have no programming experience.

For this reason, Information Systems (IS) is a great program to consider. My older brother is a senior in the IS program and he loves it. There’s nowhere near as many programming and math course requirements, but he still is very good at programming. It’s definitely safe to say that IS at CMU is as good as/better than CS at some second-tier schools. Plus, at CMU there is a huge network of employers for internships and jobs. My brother has had an internship every summer and has already received an offer for a major, CA-based tech company with a very plush salary. Yes, some companies do look at CS grads from ‘any local school,’ but top companies tend not to. My brother has noted that he knows very few people from CMU who are hired by Google straight out of college; most go to the company with a few years of work experience elsewhere. All of the other interns he met over the summer who worked for top tech companies also go to top tech schools.

That said, there IS a big gap between the amount of CS jobs out there and the amount of CS grads- your nephew would be able to get a job with a CS degree from any reputable school, but not necessarily at Apple, Google, etc.

30

I would consider adding Cornell, Penn, Northwestern, and Michigan. They all have good programs. I am not sure the percentage of white students in those CS programs is very high, so I wouldn’t think it would hurt him. If he is interested in Penn, I would consider ED if he is sure. He will need to be prepared to work very hard at all of these schools, and especially at Penn.

31

^ For UMich, one may apply to LSA for CS major. It would be a bit easier to get admitted than CoE.

32

Post #28, Google has 55,000 employees now, it can’t afford to be too choosy. There are people who graduated from UCSC and became program manager at Google. Go on to Quora and you’ll find real name with real face and real title there. Same with Apple, the last or ex- CFO graduated from Cal Poly SLO.

33

Employees attending a low ranked school is extremely common at Apple. They hire more employees who attended San Jose State than any other college, which makes sense when you consider that SJS is located a few miles from Apple’s main campus. A similar idea applies to Apple’s VPs and other highest ranked employees. Some attended high ranked schools, but others only hold a bachelor’s from Grambling State, NC State, Syracuse, Ball State, UMass, GWU, etc.

In general I think many on this site overestimate how much value typical employers put on a ranking of college in hiring decisions or career advancement. For example, in the survey of persons in hiring decisions at hundreds of companies at http://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf , employers ranked college reputation as the least import factor in evaluating resume’s of new grads for hiring decisions, in all industries except for education (GPA was slightly lower) and media/communications (relevance of coursework was lowest).

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Looks like the top three most important criteria in that survey were internships, employment, and college major.

35

FWIW, I know someone who just started at Google. He majored in CS at University of Hartford.

36

Actually now that I’m awake, Apple CEO graduated from Auburn. On this site, it’s not even mentioned frequently.

37

On this forum everyone has a perfect SAT/ACT and only wants to go to HYP. And no one actually pays for college.

38

An early post mentioned IT. Computer science is NOT information technology- IT is a business major and vastly different from CS. The CEO of a tech company has business skills that are different from the CS skill set. Many who love CS will be totally disinterested in the business/marketing end of things.

A real consideration is not only the caliber of the CS major but the school/college and admissions policies of the university. Wisconsin puts CS in Letters and Sciences, not Engineering, plus admits students to the whole university regardless of proposed major. This gives flexibility in tweaking one’s major. Plus, at this UW there are no restrictions on getting the major as there are at some U’s. It is a higher ranked department as well. Computer engineering is different- that’s hardware, not software in emphasis.

My son, with equally good HS credentials, added computer science to his honors math major (included math grad level courses) and works in CS (software developer/engineer- title has depended on the company- major players). His math background was helpful in thinking outside the box- more helpful than his initial programming skills. His UW ( meaning Madison WI, not Seattle Washington- another good school for CS which may be harder to get the major at) degree meant something to recruiters. Something for your nephew to think about. He may not want to limit himself to just CS.

I read a lengthy article about being a programmer awhile ago and son responded that it was an accurate description (do not recall it, sorry). The article mentioned different levels and that math helped with doing the higher level thinking for elite programming. It also mentioned many different programming languages and where in the world and industry various ones were prominent. Knowing some programming languages may be useless in one’s job- CS people learn more as they need them.

His list should include overall good universities that are highly rated for computer science instead of schools that merely offer the major. The good schools will not only offer more in each course, but will have many more math and computer science courses to choose from. Several courses will be cross listed in both math and CS. btw- Harvard is not one of the elite CS schools despite being so for many other fields.

There are many good options out there that have top CS departments plus overall top other academics to satisfy his intellectual needs. Given his high SAT scores he seems globally intelligent and will appreciate having a good peer group as found in elite privates and top public U’s Honors programs. He needs to consider the overall fit of the school. This includes not only academics, especially in his proposed major, but location, and social structure as well. Some U’s are heavy into the Greek system while others are not and very liberal and so forth.

The major national recruiters know the good schools for CS, including those in the Midwest.

39

At our visit to Hanover, a small LAC, we were told a recent CS grad went to Google.

During a visit to Lake Superior State - at 2500 it’s twice the size of Hanover - we were told of a CS grad this year who went to Apple. This is per memory, and I haven’t done any independent checking.

These sorts of anecdotes kind of make “prestige” a hard sell.

40

Regarding Georgia Tech - there is one admission process and major doesn’t matter.