UCSD vs Stanford (Computer Science)

Graduate School
1

Howdy CC!

Looking for some advice on graduate school. I’m currently an undergraduate B.S. Computer Science, Political Science minor student at UCSD looking to graduate 2 quarters early (Fall 2015). Now, I applied into the BS/MS program there which would only take 3 more quarters following undergrad to grab a MS. This would be great as I’m heavily involved in the UCSD community and could continue to build my network there.

However, because of my stats, I was also considering places like Stanford (Stanford in particular because it’s very close to home). If I were to apply there, the big temporal difference would be delaying school for well over half a year.

Does anyone know how different the programs are and how they would impact the rest of my career; would it be worth it to try applying to Stanford? For reference, I’m sitting on a 3.936 GPA with a lot of great extracurricular leadership and internships at some big name tech companies. I would still have to take the GRE.

Thank you all a bunch for your time and help!

2

Stanford has a better CS program, a better location (for CS jobs), and a better name. I say apply to both and see what happens. That said, Stanford’s MS program is known to be a cash cow program. The acceptance rate seems to be close to 20%, while Berkeley’s MS program probably admits well under 5% of applicants (chose Berkeley for comparison because they’re similarly ranked and UCB is very close to Stanford). There are also a couple hundred MS students in Stanford’s department. That, plus the Ph.D. students, may make it difficult to find a professor to do research with if you’re interested in the thesis route.

Maybe consider applying to Berkeley as well.