Applying to college

Ok I missed Brown and Tufts. So the decision is:
Brandeis University class of 2018 and Columbia University class of 2020!
If that sounds weird, it's the 3-2 engineering program; click here if you're unfamiliar with it.
 
Quite late, but:

Bad time during college apps+mediocre everything = yikes

Rejected (all cs): Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT
Accepted: UIUC ENG CS

Super glad that I ended up here. Didn't realize how crazy the program had gotten so quickly (34.6 departmental average ACT for incoming class... 92k avg starting salary for previous leaving class, almost guaranteed internships every summer after freshman year, $180mil/yr funding from NSF (compare to MIT/stanford CS 80mil or berkeley 110)), and I'm lucky and so so grateful to have even gotten in with my apps.

The reality is that (at this point), there is indeed a gap between mit/stanford/carnegie and everyone else at undergrad level (even berkeley), but opportunities abound regardless.

Great place, nice people, turn up ! I am up for any questions related to UIUC :)
 
Last edited:
Amherst is pretty cool. Little too wild and big for my tastes. Business and engineering are pretty good, and the honors college is great from what I hear if you got into that.

I got into Commonwealth Honors College,so yeah :) 2290 SAT kekkles ;-;

A year late, but:

Bad time during college apps+mediocre everything = yikes

Rejected (all cs): Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT
Accepted: UIUC ENG CS

Super glad that I ended up here. Didn't realize how crazy the program had gotten so quickly (34.6 departmental average ACT for incoming class... 92k avg starting salary), and I'm lucky to have even gotten in with my apps. Great place, nice people, well-funded, turn up ! I am up for any questions related to UIUC :)

holE fuck 92000 starting salary o_0. UIUC stands for which college by the way?
 
Wow that's a p awesome college for CS just sayin. Anybody mind telling me why the admissions process seems to be such a coinflip? I mean 3.4 as a GPA ain't that bad and I also have a 2290 SAT,so I'm p surprised I got into only one college :(
 
It's such a coinflip first and foremost because all of the "good" schools (read: schools that are really famous and prestigious, not necessarily the ones that are actually the best) are swamped by a deluge of applications every year, so regardless of what criteria they use to determine which little subset of that number actually get in, a lot of people who meet the requirements they set out and are definitely deserving applicants end up rejected. It seems pretty arbitrary at times, yeah - I remember a couple of years back when everybody in my senior class was getting their admissions decisions back, there was this one guy in my calculus and foreign policy classes who got rejected from UC Berkeley and accepted at Stanford, which was actually a better school for his intended major (and I think had higher standards as well, but I'm not positive - I only talked to him about it once and this was three years ago). Point being, yeah, the admission process screws a lot of otherwise deserving people over due to sheer numbers.
 
On another note, how do you feel the student-to-teacher ratio at UVA is? I know lots of smaller schools (like the rest of my list) like to show off how low they keep their ratios, but I'm not entirely sure I'd be comfortable in a class with only five or so other people.

It depends largely on what you want to do. I'm in CS (in the engineering school), and most of my classes have been 20-50 people so far. Granted, Once I start into further major courses next semester I'll probably be looking at smaller sizes. I know the premed reqs (mostly bio and chem) and the intro econ classes will put you in much larger lectures, but I haven't needed to take any of those. There's a nice tool here that shows all the classes currently offered by each department and the size of each section.
 
rejected to berkeley, stanford, carnegie, and princeton, waitlisted to harvard for EECS

accepted to and attending georgia tech (i'm from georgia).

feels bad to be rejected, my academically my "stats" were very near perfect, but (much more importantly) conveyed that there was a real, true, breathing human being behind the wall of scores that's required for these applications. i feel very frustrated because i don't feel as if there was anything, if i could have gone back and done it over, that i could have done better. i had no opportunities to get an internship as i'd have had to live at least an hour from home and i was 16 this summer.

maybe i could have dove more into EE or CS and done some projects of my own volition. maybe i could have distilled my soul into an MS Word document and submit it for my writing supplement. i dunno. whatever it was, i have left the process feeling extremely disheartened.
 
just curious - how many of you guys (who have been an active participant on smogon for a few years) mentioned smogon in your college application?
 
just curious - how many of you guys (who have been an active participant on smogon for a few years) mentioned smogon in your college application?
I mentioned it very very briefly on one single app when I was applying years ago. I was rejected from that school.
 
probably going to be going to University of Texas at Austin for biology
DTC one of my essays had stuff about how i really like the smogon doubles community
 
I'm gonna aim high and try to go for Stanford University for engineering. If that doesn't work out, I'll see what other "good" schools are offering and pick from one of them.
 
DTC I used it on my transfer application essay for the UCs. I was already in a guaranteed-acceptance program with Davis, which I've decided is where I'm going, but we'll see whether it had any impact on the other ones I applied to (it's kind of a tossup everywhere except Davis because I've got a 3.75 GPA but fuck-all else going for me).
 
Last edited:
Ok I missed Brown and Tufts. So the decision is:
Brandeis University class of 2018 and Columbia University class of 2020!
If that sounds weird, it's the 3-2 engineering program; click here if you're unfamiliar with it.

So ur going to brandeis for 3 years then Columbia for 2?
 
rejected to berkeley, stanford, carnegie, and princeton, waitlisted to harvard for EECS

accepted to and attending georgia tech (i'm from georgia).

feels bad to be rejected, my academically my "stats" were very near perfect, but (much more importantly) conveyed that there was a real, true, breathing human being behind the wall of scores that's required for these applications. i feel very frustrated because i don't feel as if there was anything, if i could have gone back and done it over, that i could have done better. i had no opportunities to get an internship as i'd have had to live at least an hour from home and i was 16 this summer.

maybe i could have dove more into EE or CS and done some projects of my own volition. maybe i could have distilled my soul into an MS Word document and submit it for my writing supplement. i dunno. whatever it was, i have left the process feeling extremely disheartened.
Fellow georgian here, and I don't think you need to be down on GA Tech. Of course any of the above schools could have been nice, but I've had many friends go to Tech and love it. Not to mention that it's a well regarded tech school. Some even put it third behind MIT and CalTech. Not sure about your financial situation too, but obviously GA Tech in-state (Hope Scholarship?) has a much lower sticker price than anything else you could have done too. My friends who have gone to GA Tech have had no difficulty whatsoever finding co-ops and the ones who graduated already found jobs pretty easily too. And best of all you get to continue living in Waffle House/Chick Fil A territory. You have no idea how much I miss that shit when I'm at school.
 
got accepted to basically every in-state school i applied to (la tech, tulane, loyola, lsu, ull) i decided on tech because a ton of family went there and they have a great engineering dept n_n
 
probably going to be going to University of Texas at Austin for biology
DTC one of my essays had stuff about how i really like the smogon doubles community
Man forreal?! I'm going to UT Austin as well for a biology major :] I believe that for your Class of 2015 the requirement for automatic admittance is top 7% and then for my class of 2016 it's top 8%. Hopefully, I'll see you there fren
 
Back
Top