Hi, @CAtransplant -
My still daughter has Northwestern on her Common App but she’s waffling about it. Certainly no merit aid would be forthcoming, and I’m not sure it hits the sweet spot sufficiently to justify the sticker price.
She hasn’t applied to CogSci across the board. She actually applied to a couple of Enviro Design/ Landscape Architecture programs - her admission to Northeastern was to their Urban Landscape program, which still sounds very cool… but as she thinks about it and gets farther along in AP CompSci, she’s leaning more and more toward a CompSci+X degree or a computation-heavy CogSci program, preferably with a design component. (But NU is pretty good about major changes - she just needs to go into the portal and submit a request to change, and make sure it gets approved before she considers committing.) She also applied to Enviro Design at Boulder, which has a CogSci certificate program that is open to ENVD students.
Irvine just didn’t float her boat. It’s very commuter-school-ish, and its new thrust in the direction of attracting computer gamers and game-designers, while I’m sure it will be wildly popular, is not her thing. She isn’t sold on the greater LA area in general and only added UCLA to her UC app at the last second. (majors: CompSci or Linguistics+CompSci. She and I agree that the pull of UCLA is not sufficient to go in a “pre” anything that has competitive admissions to the major - have seen too many of my older daughter’s friends invest years and not end up in the major they wanted.) I’ll be surprised if she gets into the CompSci major in the engineering school (her only B’s in high school were in Calc BC, although she still pulled out a 5 on the AP test; and her test scores are good but not stratospheric - SAT 730V/750M, SATII 710 Bio(M), 760 MathII) but she might get into Linguistics+CompSci in A&S, which is probably a better fit anyway. She’s pretty ambivalent about Berkeley as well - if she manages to get in there at all, she’ll probably go only if she can also get into the Bowles Hall residential college. The atmosphere at UCSD or Davis would suit her better.
Yes, UW Seattle - she applied to the HCDE (Human Centered Design & Engineering) major. As with UCLA, the majors that interest her most at UW have competitive admissions once you’re there, with only very limited direct freshman admissions. Their HCDE department looks like a very cool combination of engineering, compsci, human factors & design. If she gets a direct freshman admit offer it would be tempting, but paying OOS tuition to take her chances on getting in later, probably not. Maybe if she gets into the honors program, but even then… it’s a lot of money for the privilege of competing for resources, you know?
UC Santa Cruz - while they do have a CogSci major, it is one of those without a true department. Since she’s on the high end of UCSC’s applicant pool stat-wise, she decided to go for an engineering major as her primary and consider adding CogSci as a double-major. She chose the Bioengineering “Assistive Technology, Cognitive & Perceptual” major as her first choice, which sounds rather “niche,” but if you look at the course offerings, the knowledge base is primarily CompSci and Psych, and would blend perfectly with CogSci. (Or she could take go in the direction of a traditional CompSci major, which was her second choice.) UCSC is strong in these areas, and unlike CompSci at Berkeley (ha!) she has a good chance of getting in.
Then there’s Davis, which has CompSci, CogSci and Design all in A&S… and she really liked the campus and the vibe when we visited. But you have to pick one major to start out in, and no one of those by itself sounds all that appealing - she would have to learn more about whether it would be easy to achieve a truly interdisciplinary experience, i.e. with a double-major-plus-a-minor, or if it would just be doing several different things that wouldn’t really blend. She applied to Design because the studio sequence would be next-to-impossible to get into as a freshman non-major, whereas the prereqs for CogSci/CompSci should be accessible regardless of major… but there’s no way she would go to Davis for the design major by itself. My sense is that this option won’t add up and if Davis is her best option in the UC system, she’ll go to Northeastern instead, where blended majors are overtly supported and encouraged. (Plus she’s liking the idea of co-ops, and being in Boston.)
Then there’s RPI and Rochester. The design piece is missing at Rochester but they make up for that with excellent music opportunities and one of the best smaller-college type experiences of the schools she’s applying to, and of course excellent CogSci/CompSci. At RPI she applied to the design program, because you can only pick one major to apply to, but the majority of design students are double-majors, with MechE+Design being the most common but CompSci+Design also a well-worn path. The CogSci department looks great and fairly computationally-oriented, such that the major requirements for CogSci and CompSci overlap a great deal, so I don’t see why CogSci+Design shouldn’t be as much of an option as CompSci+Design, but an inquiry email on the subject went unanswered… and the downsides of RPI (Troy, 70/30 M/F ratio, and a culture that may veer too far into “nerd culture” territory to appeal, as my D is not a gamer/anime fan/etc.) are likely to outweigh the appeal of the academic programs unless they knock our socks off with a merit aid offer much better than Northeastern’s.
How’s that for a detailed answer? Kudos if you got through that 
