Hi, currently I’m a freshman, CS major at Johns Hopkins University. I’m a Washington native considering transferring back to UW while applying as a direct admit to the CSE department. It’s not that I hate Hopkins, but I miss my family, girlfriend, and home city Seattle so much and because UW is ranked highly in CS I was thinking there wouldn’t be much difference in the education I get here and the education I get at UW.
However, there are several drawbacks I’m worried about UW CSE that I hope you guys can dispel.
I feel like the advantage of Hopkins is the small size so I can get into any course I want. At UW are getting into CS courses tough even as a CSE major? I feel like since the number of CS students is so big it might be hard to get into the core CS courses.
a) also how easy is it to double major? b) and are neurobiology courses tough to get into? I ask because I’m a CS and neuroscience major at Hopkins.
Can undergraduates regularly take graduate or professional evening courses? Hopkins has these upper level undergraduate courses I was planning on taking that are graduate courses at UW like data mining, parallel programming, and computer vision. I want to transfer knowing that I can learn the same material I could at Hopkins.
Is it tough to find a research position? Again I’m worried because of the large student body.
One part about the degree requirements that annoys me is the areas of knowledge requirement. It’s a lot of credits! I’m wondering how onerous taking these classes are or does it go by like a breeze? And is there any way to waive some of them?
Lastly, how hard is it to get into the Honors program as a transfer? I got accepted into the honors program when I applied for regular admissions and my GPA right now is decent but I got A’s in all my science and math class, my writing course brought me down -_-.
THANK YOU for reading this. It’s a long post so just answering some of questions will make me grateful :).
I saw your post on reddit as well, but here’s some answers for the other CCers.
It's not difficult. Some classes, like security, are almost always seniors only because it's so popular. The advisors and professors can overflow students into classes unless it's absolutely a fire hazard. I've had a few classes switch to a larger lecture hall to accommodate more students.
As long as you’ve been accepted into the major(s), you can double major (or triple… quadruple…). Some other majors are open (e.g. sign a piece of paper, that’s that), but unfortunately both computer science and neurobio are fairly competitive.
Yes. It's not uncommon.
No. Just chat with a professor (or graduate student) with research that you find interesting.
I personally just took classes that I found interesting, or added an extra 1-2 credit seminar every quarter to make progress on them. Natural Sciences are all completed with your CSE requirements, so you'll mostly just be looking at VLPA, I&S, and other elective courses. See: http://www.cs.washington.edu/public_files/ugrad/curriculum/CS_reqs_au13.pdf
I've heard it's relatively easy -- just keep a certain GPA and write a statement about your interest in pursuing interdisciplinary studies (in your case, CSE+Neurobio). I was a freshman admit to the Honors program, but dropped it after a couple of years since it didn't align with my goals.
Sorry for the redundancy. Just wanted to get as much feedback as a I could on two sites.
I was wondering lastly if you double major does your area of knowledge requirements needed for CSE go down?
I also saw this page: http://www.cs.washington.edu/students/ugrad/double_major
where is says exceptions to CS degree requirements are made on a individual basis. So if you go into your advisor with a well thought out plan related to your goals can they waive certain credits?
And I don’t know if you know anything about this or not but how is the applied math major at UW? It’s another field I’m interested in doing courses in.