Advice to rising senior on elite school apps

Not sure Harvard thinks of itself as good enough :-).
The correct framing is that they are exceptionally good at some things, but likely don’t offer everything.

When my kid was researching CS schools some 4 years ago, he said Princeton was exceptionally good in Theory, coming up in AI (because they and no one else for that matter seem to be able to retain AI faculty) etc, and had no presence in HPC and HCI, and he said he did not care about HPC, HCI and to some extent did not care about AI. Indeed, if you want to do HPC, there are a handful of govt funded national labs that do nuclear research, and that’s where you need to go, including a place in Tennessee, which @tsbna44 would be glad to know :-). So you need to know what you want, and what they are good at.

Apart from being good at some parts of CS, Harvard can also throw (not directly though) exceptional amounts of money at you if you want to do a startup. And place exceptionally well into some industries after the CS degree.

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