I’m currently a freshman in college, and I want to go to a good grad school. However, I barely have any idea on how grad school admissions work. I heard that your GPA has to be really high to get into Harvard PhD for CS. What is the minimum GPA? What is the average GPA? What about GRE? Anything else? Do i get lower standards if I come from a tier 1 CS undergrad? (Like lower GPA). Is getting Cs unacceptable? Thanks
This is the undergraduate forum for Harvard College. You should repost your question in the graduate forum: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/
Sorry but this begs asking. Why Harvard? It’s well regarded but I can think of a dozen more prominent CS grad programs off the top of my head. Or is this just Ivy fever?
BTW: Cornell, Pton and Columbia are higher ranked than H for grad school in CS.
So is UMass Amherst, I believe. Check rankings for grad CS. However, you are a freshman. Don’t think about this for awhile.
Oops, i didnt know this was undergraduate only. MIT, Stanford, and Harvard is my dream CS grad program. Ranking wise, it seems Harvard is the easiest of the 3 to get in. I’m worried as a freshman right now because of my GPA. It is hard to get good grades.
There are lots of good schools for CS. And in the CS field you may not need grad school, at least at first. Don’t ruin your undergrad years by worrying about getting in to Harvard, Check out the online rankings of grad programs in CS, if you really must think about this now. But better to just do the best you can, work hard, make friends, do internships, explore possibilities during college and worry about grad school later. No reason to fix on these particular schools.
I second that idea – as it all depends on what you can do and if you have the skill-set to deliver!
Very long story, short: My son was on the computer science track at Yale and came home Spring break of his sophomore year and said “I can’t do it anymore; I just can’t sit in the basement and write code. What they are teaching us is so uncreative and boring and it has nothing to do with what I want to do in life.”
So, my son switched majors and ultimately graduated with honors in Psychology. But, he kept up his love for CS on the side, and when it came time to applying for jobs, he went after computer science and made it to the third interview for a bunch of tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat.
I don’t want to give away too much, but he’s currently working at one of the above companies as a data scientist; working right alongside PhD’s and making the SAME salary (low six figures, plus stock options, free healthcare, 4 weeks paid vacation, free membership to the gym of your choice, plus free breakfast and lunch). So, depending on your skill-set, you really don’t need to go to graduate school for CS.
By grad school, successful students have lost this Prince Charming “dream school” fixation and have become more realistic about what universities do and are for. Please concentrate on doing well in undergrad and inform yourself about the realities of grad school.
From your posting history you are a freshman at Carnegie Mellon? If so there are faculty and grad students in CS all around you. They are the people you should be talking to, not strangers on CC.
And CMU CS grad is at or near the tops of all “rankings” lists…
Thanks for all the info. Salary isn’t really important to me. I want to stay in academia. I want to get a PhD to pursue my passion, not for a salary boost, and I agree, PhD for CS just for salary boost is a waste of time. I posted on CC to get a broader perspective. In addition, different schools have different criteria. The main certain is how important grades are for grad school admission. Should I stress myself out about GPA or just try my best and focus on undergraduate research.
Work hard but reasonably and don’t stress about GPA too much. That said, if you are not doing well in your CS, math or science classes, it is always good to consider studying in an area where you do well, and enjoy it. Not for grad school, but for your undergrad experience.
My son loved his CS studies at Brown, so everyone’s experiences are different. I agree with the poster above: CMU is topnotch and you must have great resources in terms of people to talk to, there.
Harvard’s CS Dept. is really on the upswing. They have made quite a few major hires in the last few years especially in the very hot field of machine learning and also computational complexity. Steve Ballmer has stated that it is his goal to make Harvard’s CS on par with the top CS departments in the world and he is putting his money where his mouth is. Of course, it will still take years and dollars before Harvard achieves that goal but CS PhD from Harvard is not something to be taken lightly.
Where CS professors come from:
PhD institutions where they come from: 1) MIT, 2) Berkeley, 3) Stanford, 4) CMU, 5) UIUC, 6) Princeton, 7) Cornell, 8) UWash, 9) Georgia Tech, 10) Harvard.
Of course some programs (e.g. Berkeley, UIUC, UWash) are huge, while others are merely large (MIT, Stanford, CMU). Adjusted for size, Princeton and Harvard probably do quite fine.
Undergraduate institutions where they came from: 1) MIT, 2) Harvard, 3) Berkeley, 4) Cornell, 5) IIT Madras, 6) Tsinghua, 7) CMU, 8) IIT Kanpur, 9) Princeton, 10) Brown.
Similar comment on size applies.
Real data here.
Source:
http://jeffhuang.com/computer_science_professors.html
Darn, how to delete this, now that I added the source to my previous post …
Thanks!