<p>So I'm a high school senior with decent grades/scores (SAT I 2190, Math II 800, Physics 750, IB Predicteds 40/42) and I was wondering what a pretty good university to apply to would be that I'm pretty much guaranteed getting into.</p>
<p>I'm applying to plenty of reaches like Cornell, Stanford, Ann Arbor, Ga Tech and UIUC but I can't seem to find a good school for Comp Sci which would give me good employment opportunities or would get me into a good grad school etc. Preferably i'm looking for something on the East Coast, but really any ideas would be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>Note: I've been recommended to try UMass Amherst but I just don't see myself going there, but if I can't find anything else i'll just apply there.</p>
<p>Maryland is quite good as is Wisconsin-Madison. Umass is good enough to get you good work and grad school chances, I believe the department is quite strong. But these are expensive for OOS. What is your home state, no alternative there?</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m deciding whether or not to apply to Maryland now. I considered UW-Madison, but I wasn’t sure whether it qualified as a safety or not. I mean it’s pretty well reputed for computer science right? So I just assumed it’s not exactly a cake-walk to get into. But is it? And how is Maryland compared to UW-Madison?</p>
<p>I was really put off by UMass Amherst’s whole riot thing a couple years ago and my friend who visited told me the dorms are pretty bad.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I don’t have a home state since although i’m a citizen (born in NJ), I currently live in India and have lived here since 6th grade. So i’m OOS for every college I apply to.</p>
<p>@mom, Money isn’t a problem for me. I’m in a high income bracket, and it’s not much of a problem for my parents to pay $50k a year. Although obviously I’d like some sort of financial aid, I really don’t expect any and neither do my parents. So my only condition for a safety to in fact be a safety is really just whether or not i’ll like it there and what the quality of education is.</p>
<p>Thank you for the advice, I wasn’t aware there would be good employment opportunities in CS no matter where I went… I thought it was more like that if I went to a not-so-well-reputed uni, it would be harder to find a good job.</p>
<p>However, what I’m still worried about is that if I do end up going to my safety, would it really be easy to get into a good grad school? I mean if I was an admissions officer at MIT, wouldn’t I favor the kid who went through Georgia Tech’s rigorous CS program over the kid who went to a much less rigorous program at a school like UMass Amherst?</p>
<p>mean if I was an admissions officer at MIT, wouldn’t I favor the kid who went through Georgia Tech’s rigorous CS program over the kid who went to a much less rigorous program at a school like UMass Amherst?</p>
<p>PhD programs consist of students from everywhere. When my son (an Alabama grad) applied to math and engineering PhD programs, he was accepted to every school he applied to…even the elites. He had the grades, the classes, research, LORs, and the very high GRE scores. As a matter of fact, a few of the schools said that his scores were the highest of their applicants. </p>
<p>His PhD classmates come from everywhere…ivies, flagships, small privates, even one from a directional Texas school </p>
<p>CS isn’t some 'hard to teach" major. There are over 100 very good programs out there. Employers can’t just hire from 50 schools. They’re hiring from 200+ schools.</p>
<p>Got it. Doesn’t matter where I go. Thank you for the reassurance!</p>
<p>I still need help finding a safety though. Is UW-Madison easy to get into for someone OOS with my grades or is it still a match/reach? Would U of Maryland be a good safety to apply to? I really don’t have any idea where I’d be guaranteed admission.</p>
<p>Any of the flagships would be fine…Purdue, UIUC, Maryland, Wisconsin, UMich, etc. You might also try some of the UC’s since money is no object for your family. I have a nephew who did CS at UCI…got snapped up by Google upon graduation. He’s done very well, and now Google is paying for his grad school.</p>
<p>I think you are very likely at Wisconsin-Madison, because of stats, but they admit around 25% oos I think but there isn’t data on those students. Overall admissions were 53% last year. I don’t know if you can call it a safety. But you don’t have to worry about competitive CS admissions, you just apply to the college. After you get at least a 2.8 in Intro to Java programming, discrete math, and data structures, you can declare a CS major. (My daughter is in grad school for CS there and it is a great college town.)</p>
<p>Maryland is ranked nearly as good in PHD programs, and I’m sure that the undergrad strength follows. However it is slightly harder to get admitted. So if you are going for easier admission pick Wisconsin.</p>
<p>Okay sure, that seems reasonable. After doing some research, UW-Madison seems like a better fit anyways than some of my schools so I’ll definitely add it in.</p>
<p>On a side note, do you mention your intended major when applying there? Because even if it’s better to apply undeclared, I want to mention CS as my intended major since it’ll be fairly obvious by my ECs anyways.</p>
<p>You have to check each school to see if intended major affects selectivity in admissions. If it does, then it is likely that changing into the major if one enrolls not in the major requires another competitive admission process.</p>
<p>Okay, I checked and I do have to declare my intended major (but I can also choose undecided). Can’t find anything on selectivity based on the chosen major though…</p>
<p>Right, you can put CS as intended major, but you are still only competing for admission to the college, as far as I’ve been told. My daughter didn’t go for undergrad there so I don’t know the details, check with the Wisconsin forum maybe someone knows the ins and outs.</p>
<p>I just want to say that coming from a strong department is of course beneficial, but all the colleges mentioned here and also in Mom2collegekids post are good for good grad schools. It comes down to what you do there. You want to be involved with research that will give you good experience and LOR’s. When you look at colleges, find out how accessible undergraduate research is. At Wisconsin, you can get involved even as a lower division student. Glad you like it.</p>
<p>Although to a large extent true, there is an important caviar. For the less-well-known, not-top-reputation CS programs, and colleges with small CS departments the recruiting for CS graduates is regional. Further, very-top employers often limit their recruiting to the dozen or two universities with very strong CS programs. And recruiting by such employers is typically very limited at LACs because it is not cost effective for employers to recruit where the likelihood of finding matches is low. You can work around such limitations through internships, etc. But you’ll find that internships at the the best companies are hard to get if your college does not have the “expected” reputation level.</p>
<p>So there is another dimension to your quest – what do you plan to do after graduation? If you expect to work in the United States and you have a sense for the type of employer you’d prefer, then the prestige and location of university does matter. The “best” programs from that perspective include many of the state universities (e.g. University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Texas Austin, some of the University of California campuses, etc.). Some of these public universities are a notch above “safety”. If you have a particular attraction to settling down in one particular part of the United States then you can broaden your net – e.g. if Boston, Northeastern comes to mind, or if Seattle, then the University of Washington comes to mind, etc.</p>
<p>@BrownParent, okay, i’ll post in the UW forum to verify. Also, I do want to do undergrad research, but what I want to do it in is really specific and the only two universities that I found that have extensive research opportunities in it are Cornell and GTech, while what I found so far in Wisconsin isn’t as fun sounding (although this isn’t a turn-off and i’m still going to apply for sure since my interests would probably change by then anyways).</p>
<p>@fogcity, after I graduate, i’m just planning to work until I can pay for grad school (no idea how long that’ll take), so if I only get a regional job, i’m perfectly content as long as it enables me to eventually put myself through school again (which will anyways result in me moving to wherever the school is). So i’m not too worried about colleges location-wise. Once I go to grad school i’ll likely move anyways. Sorry if that doesn’t really make sense, it’s nearly 11:30 here and I find it difficult to convey what i’m trying to say when i’m sleepy haha.</p>
<p>UW Madison has rolling admissions, which is a nice feature for a safety. Apply soon, get your decision early, then you’ll know in time to find another safety if needed.</p>