Hi! I am a Junior at a public school in an affluent suburb of Boston interested in computer science. I just created my first college list. I am not sure which are reaches, matches, and safeties, and if I have enough. I have not toured yet, so this list will likely shrink.
Could you guys let me know if there is anything I am missing and what I should change? And what could I do to increase my chances at some of these colleges?
Stats: 1600 SAT, 790 Bio M, will take math 2. 4.95/5 GPA (4.0 unweighted). As many AP’s as my school offers/allows, which is not many (we can only take one AP lab science throughout hs).
EC’s:
President of Programming club
Software manager of successful FTC team (have been doing FTC all 3 years and First robotics since 3rd grade, probably have spent 400+ hours on robotics in high school)
Student mentor of 2 FLL teams, one made states, 60 hrs volunteering
Linguistics club co-prez
Piano for 6 years, have won state awards
Tabla (Indian drum) for 11 years, have had a professional debut accompanying famous artists and will try to submit a supplemental tape. Also spent ~30 hours giving lessons)
Hackathons: Accepted to and attended many prestigious hackathons such as Pennapps and hackRPI.
Amazon Alexa developer (had a couple skills with ~2k customers each)
Member of High School AI Lab where I gave online presentations about various technical AI topics
NHS + 20 hrs tutoring
JV Tennis & XC
Summer/research:
Attended Beaverworks Summer Institute at MIT. Learned about autonomous systems and AI from MIT professors, and applied it to make autonomous racecars. Our team’s racecar came in 2nd place!
Research w/ MIT grads at Center for Brains Minds and Machines on AI (not an assistant)
Self-conducted AI research (planning with a friend right now)
Sorry everyone, some stuff got cut off.
Here’s the list:
MIT
Uc Berkeley
Brown
CMU
Harvard
Uiuc
UPenn
USC
Stanford
Ga tech
U Wash
Northeastern
UCLA
Umich
U Toronto
@ucbalumnus I really like toronto as a safety because I can know if I got in early and they only look at grades and test scores. I am also going to apply to my in state safety.
Should I look at more lower range colleges, and if so, which?
If you are perfectly happy going to (presumably) UMass, and your admission there and to the CS major is assured, then you do not need any other safeties. Toronto and other early action schools only become safeties if you are admitted early.
If you are not perfectly happy to attend your safeties, then you need to find safeties that you like.
@ucbalumnus Thanks! You seem very knowledgeable so if you don’t mind could I ask another question?
Some schools like Carnegie Mellon and UCB have cs programs in their liberal arts colleges that are easier to get into and have many overlapping classes but dont offer the same degree.
I am interested in taking this approach for some colleges, not only because its easier to get in, but because I am interested in continuing with some humanities classes.
To add information on CMU. Its school of computer science (SCS) is extremely selective, much more than rest of the school (5% success rate, as compared to 10+ percent for engineering). It runs a electrical and computer engineering degree through its engineering school (CIT), which may be easier to get into than SCS, but still more competitive than other engineering majors. One can go heavy on software electives with this program and probably land in Google/Facebook/your favorite software company.
It also has a machine learning and statistics degree (seems like CMU’s name for data analytics / data sciences programs that have come up). Then it also has an information systems major. Probably either of them is easier to get into as compared to SCS, but still very selective.