My act is a 30 (E31 M38 R32 S29)
My unweighted GPA is a 3.7
Unfortunately I don’t have many EC activities but I am going to be captain of my Rowing/Crew team. I am also a junior and taking the ACT two more times in April, though I don’t think I can get any higher than a 32 at most (being completely honest). I have been really interested in Comp Sci. since I was young and I want a school with a decent programs. I’m also slightly more attracted to smaller/medium schools.
Any suggestions?
I have a couple schools listed below but I’m not quite sure if I could get into them so…
Purdue University
University of Minnesota (in-state)
University of Illinois Urbana (only the Comp Sc. - X program)
University of Maryland - College Park
Case Western Reserve University
I think you have a great list there for computer science schools. A lot of them are big, if you are looking for small/medium schools. I know CWRU (“Crew”) very well. In admissions, it seems very score focused, so you’d want to get as strong of an ACT as possible for that one in particular. I think the others are also very competitive for CS (see my comments below about direct admission, etc.)
Some medium/smaller ones you might explore: Santa Clara University (IN SILICON VALLEY, so internship opportunities on your doorstep, medium sized); Creighton University in Omaha; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI); University of Tulsa (very good STEM, 3000+ students). These are not safeties for you at all, but you’d be a reasonable applicant at all of them. With a strong finish to junior year and a great start to senior year, and a little higher on your very good ACT score, you might look at Rochester and William and Mary, which are very outstanding mid-sized national universities, and very competitive in admissions. They both are very good for computer science. It’s advantageous to be a male applicant at W&M because the school gets pretty many more applications from female students. It is a public university and expensive for OOS students; you don’t mention the financial side. Most of these would be expensive but all outstanding and at least potentially in reach.
Is that Math score supposed to read 28 instead of 38? That would make sense.
There was a similar comment on a similar current thread about CS: you’ll want to research how a school admits to CS: some will have CS majors open to all students; some will require a certain GPA at the university by a certain point (for example second semester sophomore year) to major in CS; some will require current students at the university to apply to the program; some will require direct admission into the CS program when you apply from high school. For many schools, acceptance into CS can be very difficult, whether for current students at the school or for high school students applying. For example, it is notoriously difficult to get into CS at Carnegie Mellon, where students must apply directly from high school (at least that was true a couple of years ago).