Applying to college

Bughouse

Like ships in the night, you're passing me by
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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
 

MikeDawg

Banned deucer.
Wrong answer

Edit: if you are going engineering, Berkeley. Princeton for everything else (including comp sci, though that one is probably a toss up)
Lol how are you about to say that comp sci is a toss up?

Berkeley isn't in the stanford/mit/cmu undergrad triad, but it is as close as you can get. Also, Troy Bolton went to berkeley.
 

Ender

pelagic
is a Contributor Alumnus
Lol how are you about to say that comp sci is a toss up?

Berkeley isn't in the stanford/mit/cmu undergrad triad, but it is as close as you can get. Also, Troy Bolton went to berkeley.
I mean, he should go wherever he wants, but undergraduate programs at Princeton are essentially universally stronger than Berkeley. If he wanted to go to Berkeley (or anywhere else) for grad school, Princeton will help him get there. But yes, Berkeley probably has stronger graduate programs in comp sci than Princeton.

And the argument xyz went to School A holds little water. I could just as easily counter with an argument saying xyz successful person went to Princeton and we would never get anywhere.

Edit: I just looked up who Troy Bolton is. The above still stands, but is just less relevant.
 

uragg

Walking the streets with you in your worn-out jeans
is a Contributor Alumnus
dave franco's character in 21 jump street also was going to berkeley!

but to actually add something of substance instead of just telling ppl to cum 2 cal, here's my insight on cal vs. ivies in terms of undergraduate experience: in berkeley there are A LOT of ppl, especially in the cs and engineering departments. this means that you do not get as much personalized attention and interaction with professors and TAs as you would at a smaller school normally, but that isn't to say it isn't available. you just have to make the effort yourself to talk to people whose work you're interested in and they are more than happy to help/talk. this also means that there isn't much hand-holding in the classes and it kind of forces you to learn to use the resources around you whether that's looking at online documentation or talking to peers or instructors. depending on your style of learning this can be a good or a bad thing, imo it is pretty helpful in terms of simulating real world project experience where the onus is on you to make your shit work because you become self-sufficient. obviously there will be people to help you along the way but the support system I would venture is weaker than say Princeton just cuz there are so many ppl here it's impossible to give the same ratio of attention per student.

with that said I'm sure both programs are sexcellent and you won't regret the choice either way. but networking is gr8 in silicon valley/sf for eecs
 

MikeDawg

Banned deucer.
I think that it is important to note that, in Engineering majors especially, a big school has a lot of merit as far as employment goes. At UIUC, for example, there are more than a dozen career fairs every year... And that is just for CS/sometimes other Engineering kids. The same, I assume, holds true for places like Berkeley. Having SO many super qualified students at a super prestigous department is a goldmine for recruiters... THEY have to get on a waiting list to get a booth at career fairs because of how high-demand these kids are.

Another factor is that CS is the largest focus at these schools. Sure, these are big places with lots of kids, but the CS departments are taken VERY well care of and are the primary focus as far as funding/etc goes for flagship CS schools.

This just isn't true (almost absurd CS-specific recruiting and a solid focus on improving CS above all else) about a school like Princeton. There will certainly be plenty of opportunities, but there will also certainly be far less resources.

Yes, there are huge class sizes for these oversized departments (think 500 people per lecture for earlier classes), but that doesn't mean that individual attention is lost by any means. Going to meet with a professor individually is as easy as walking up to their office on whatever day of the week and hanging out. The real applicable information is usually broken up into smaller lab sections/discussions anyway.Getting individual attention, in my opinion, is never a hard thing to do. Given that most Engineering professors are making shit given what they could be making with 4 less years of schooling and a decade less of experience, they do have to love their job and care about the students.

Sure, princeton is renowned as an "undergrad" school, but that doesn't mean that the other schools put any less of an emphasis on their own undergrad programs (especially in a major like this where the smaller minority go to grad school as opposed to moving straight to the field).

US news aside, go to professors, recruitors, etc., and they will tell you that there are very evident "cut-offs" amongst undergrad departments, and Princeton is not apart of the upper eschelon.
 

Ender

pelagic
is a Contributor Alumnus
Just out of curiosity, which CS firms wouldn't recruit from Princeton? I'm at an Ivy with a weaker CS dept than Princeton and we still have people being recruited out the wazoo from Silicon Valley startups and places like Google, etc, so I would be surprised to hear that any firms would turn away Princeton CS grads.
 

Acklow

I am always tired. Don't bother me.
I'm excited to say I'm going back to school at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul (got accepted and transferred credits pretty easily). It's a low-cost school so it doesn't carry any reputation like higher end schools do but I'm proud to say that I'm not going to be in any debt upon graduating since I'm paying for it out of pocket. My major is going to be in Urban English Education which works well with my goal of teaching abroad down the road. I'm pumped to do the school thing to say the least.
 

Cresselia~~

Junichi Masuda likes this!!
Australia question:
Do Australian universities have advanced standing programs? (Meaning, can you enter at year 3 if you were studying a similar degree elsewhere?)
If so, how important is the GPA from your previous university course?

Would be super grateful if people can answer my question.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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I think that it is important to note that, in Engineering majors especially, a big school has a lot of merit as far as employment goes. At UIUC, for example, there are more than a dozen career fairs every year... And that is just for CS/sometimes other Engineering kids. The same, I assume, holds true for places like Berkeley. Having SO many super qualified students at a super prestigous department is a goldmine for recruiters... THEY have to get on a waiting list to get a booth at career fairs because of how high-demand these kids are.

This is big, UIUC's CS program isn't the best in the world (usanews lists it at #5), but it is significantly bigger than programs that beat it out. I'm in my first year so I haven't paid that much attention, but from what I've seen, career fairs are EXTREMELY common for CS here.
 
There are other factors to consider too: here at UVA our CS department isn't super highly regarded (around #30 iirc) and we usually have only ~150 people per year in the CS majors, but we get recruited pretty hard largely because of our proximity to the job hub that is DC.
 
This is big, UIUC's CS program isn't the best in the world (usanews lists it at #5), but it is significantly bigger than programs that beat it out. I'm in my first year so I haven't paid that much attention, but from what I've seen, career fairs are EXTREMELY common for CS here.
That's a pretty cool list. Makes me want to go Berkeley after I graduate for MSc or PhD even more if possible.

Btw, is there an international version? Interested to see where my college ranks.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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Not for usanews no. There are international versions (lots of good Chinese and British schools) but most of them (plus this one actually) are for undergrad programs. Phd's are a different ballpark
 
Not for usanews no. There are international versions (lots of good Chinese and British schools) but most of them (plus this one actually) are for undergrad programs. Phd's are a different ballpark
Oh no I meant undergrad actually. Just wondering where my college is ranked there
 
Thanks for all the advice! After reading this, I'm now heavily leaning towards Brandeis/Columbia.

For the record, I only applied to small schools b/c I felt that larger schools were not my cup of tea. I wanted to do engineering at Tufts but got rejected, so now I'm left with liberal arts engineering. Moreover, Brandeis' version of the 3-2 program requires me to do research at some point, and the school's proximity to Boston opens up a lot of internship opportunities, so getting good research done there shouldn't be too difficult. There's also 260 clubs at Brandeis, so I should be able to find one connected to engineering. And, of course, Columbia is a great engineering school (and an outstanding school in general), and I'm fairly sure that engineering is what I want to do with my life.
I know so many kids who transfer from Trinity.
 

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