Do I have a chance?

Graduate School
1

I am going to be applying for graduate school (M.S.) for Fall 2016 in Computer Science this year. So I want to see if anyone has any insights or comments or advise for my profile since it’s not the best…

I started college at school A and went there for 2 years before transferring out to school B. School A is a medium sized not so famous urban university (something like SFSU) and school B is a huge flagship state school (something like ASU). I performed very poorly at school A due to several reasons which I plan to explain in my SOP and ended up with a ~2.6 GPA. However, >80% of the courses at school A were general ed. liberal art courses. I will be graduating from school B with about a ~3.2 GPA.

Now since most competitive graduate schools set minimum (sometimes recommended) requirements at 3.0. Do I have a chance? If both my GPA’s are averaged, they would average to about ~2.9.

Some pluses in my profile (I think):
2 student assistant positions of technical nature (technical assistant & Enterprise Infrastructure assistant)
1 summer internship in software engineering at JP Morgan.

Also, in regards to the GRE, I’m taking it in the summer this year so I still have a fairly good amount of time to get better. My mocks right now are giving me 310-315. By the summer I’m confident of a score between 315-325.

Some things I have heard from people:

  1. People have gotten in with GPA’s < 3.0, either because of work experience or their Technical GPA was high.
  2. Grad admissions mostly care about your grades in major related courses…
  3. You can ace the GRE, write a strong SOP and get good LOR’s and it just might work…

BTW, the schools I plan on applying to are:
UC - Davis
UC - Santa Barbara
UC - Santa Cruz
Virginia Tech
UC - San Diego
Ohio State
University at Buffalo SUNY

What do you guys think? anyone in or was in a similar situation? any comments, insights,… anything will be appreciated!

2

You certainly stand a chance at some of these schools for an M.S. The answers to your questions are:

  1. Yes, work experience and major GPA are a plus.
  2. Yes this is the case
  3. Graduate admissions looks at everything and having a strong GRE helps. But if there is a large mismatch between your GRE and your academic performance, that does raise some questions. Strong letters of recommendation help too but if you apply to a highly selective program, it is more likely that they will do an initial cut based on GPA and GRE and look in detail at letters of recommendation only later.