<p>Hello all, I am a freshman in CS and had a question about graduate programs. At this point, I am not sure if I want to go directly to grad school or later on in my career, but I am sure I want to further my education beyond the bachelor's level at some point. Assuming that I have decent GREs, strong research, good ECs/leadership, etc., what GPA would be expected to get into a solid program? By "solid" I mean well respected in both academia and industry, not necessarily prestigious like Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, Cornell, etc. Thank you for your help.</p>
<p>Graduate school is not as easy to generalize like that as undergraduate programs are. Suffice it to say that it will vary greatly by school, department, and even the professor you are hoping to have as your advisor. Generally, you will want greater than a 3.0 or many places will probably just deny you outright. To be safe and be admitted to somewhere good (but certainly not everywhere), you probably will need at least a 3.3 to 3.5. If you hit the 3.7 or higher range, you are pretty solid.</p>
<p>Remember, though, those are very loose guidelines. For what it’s worth, I had just over an overall 3.3 for my undergraduate work and was very nervous about getting into places due to the lack of solid information out there. I ended up applying to 10 places for mechanical/aerospace engineering and ended up getting into 7 of them in one fashion or another and I ended up in a top 10 Ph.D. program (by US News’ estimate, anyway) working for an NAE professor. Other top 10 programs certainly rejected me, of course, but not all. I did well on the GRE and had some undergraduate research and good professor references as well, though, so that certainly helped a ton. GPA is far from everything in graduate school admissions.</p>
<p>Are general rankings or rankings regarding the specific field a better indicator of selectivity? If a school is ranked, say 15th for CS but is ranked 60th overall, would they be generally more selective than a school who is ranked 62nd for CS but is ranked 26th overall?</p>
<p>As Bonehead said, it’s not easily generalizable. Definitely the department matters and the prestige of the college as a whole is rather unimportant. However selectivity isn’t as clear cut at that either. </p>
<p>You should definitely aim to have at least a 3.5. The higher the better, but above that more/better research would probably be worth a small hit to GPA if it came down to it.</p>
<p>Department ranking trumps the school ranking for graduate school just as it does for undergraduate programs. However, in many cases, the department ranking is less easy to define since one department may be very good at one specialty but not as good at another. For example, at School A, maybe their CS department is “ranked” number 1 for artificial intelligence but number 50 for data mining. Even if School B’s CS department is ranked higher overall but their AI program is ranked lower, you will often be better off going to School A.</p>
<p>This is why it is so difficult to quantify. If you are just interested in getting a master’s degree, then going by the strength of the department is a perfectly good metric and it’s a tad easier to compare. If you are looking to get a PhD, you really need to be looking at which schools are good in specific research areas, and how renowned a given professor is in that field can pay dividends down the road much more than the name of the school or department.</p>
<p>In terms of selectivity, there really is no good way to look at it in a general sense like that. You just have to put yourself out there and see what happens and try to make sure you have a backup plan. As with your undergraduate admissions, don’t just apply one place unless you just absolutely refuse to go anywhere else.</p>