Well, being a bit anal retentive, I did go back and look at our Purdue bursar statements from the last 4 years, and broke out my trusty calculator. The maximum that we paid as parents of an OOS student was about $43,500 for tuition/fees/room and board/books; the minimum is this year so far, with off-campus living, projected to be about $39,000. (No transportation costs included.)
So, mea culpa on the costs estimate! My wife probably did tell me the correct number, I just wasn’t listening at the time! (She is the one who talks to our 529 plan administrator, so she definitely knows the numbers better than I do!)
January 29th, 2022. What a week this past week was! Note: All admittances - admitted to CS unless otherwise specified
New Decisions:
NC State - Admitted
UNC - Admitted
University of Michigan - Deferred
Georgia Tech - Rejected
Previous Decisions (all admittances unless otherwise specified):
Fordham - Deferred
Tulane - Deferred
Purdue - Admitted second choice major of Business Analytics and Information Management
Michigan Technological University
Elon University
Stetson University (Received $21,000 yearly presidential scholarship)
Seton Hall University (Received $88,500 scholarship for 4 years - $21,000 annually)
University of South Carolina (Received minimum of $86,000 scholarship for 4 years)
UNC Charlotte
University of Alabama
Northern Arizona University
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Missouri S&T (Received $16,000 total scholarship)
East Carolina University
Florida Institute of Technology ($40,000 total scholarship, $10,000 yearly)
Arizona State University (Presidential award, $15,500 yearly w/admittance to Barrett)
Waiting for:
RIT
UVA
UIUC
Baylor
Northeastern
Virginia Tech
Vanderbilt
Wash U
Harvard
Cornell
Johns Hopkins
Carnegie Mellon
Denison
Florida Southern College
UMass Lowell
I have 2 great in-state options now! So happy that I got into NCSU and UNC! Thank you everyone for all your help and guidance! I can open the rest of the decisions with ease.
My next update will be sometime in mid-February. Please feel free to give and advice and input!
Can i ask why you applied to so many schools? Your stats are good so you were likely to get into many of them. Just curious. It is interesting to follow along how you did at each place?
You might be the only student ever to apply to Florida Southern, UMASS Lowell, and the Ivies
Excited for you to see the end result - but with your two in-state, now it’s just for sport
I get it though - you put in the work, it’s awesome to see the final result.
lol, yeah, definitely an ecclectic collection of schools but very interesting to see how it all shakes out. rd123456, what is your dream school actually? You are in at UNC and State, both in-state, but would either of those get bumped by something else? And which one of those has your preference?
My dream school is just one of the ivies, haha (I know, pretty cliche). If I get in to an ivy that will allow me to attend for fairly cheap (maybe 40-50k), I’ll definitely attend one of those. Other than ivys, dream school has to be Johns Hopkins.
It will be interesting to see the end results of all of the applications that you submitted.
I guess my next question is this…did you have to pay an application fee? If so, was it $85 per application? That would make it around $2,800 + spent on applications Are you sure it was worth it ?
The flip side of this is you can get the results, document it, and write a book about the process.
No, I spent about a $1000 on application fees because I emailed schools and received fee waivers from them and also found some general fee waivers online. And yes! I am documenting everything.
Oh hey! My journey as in the post that I am updating right? And sure! I am glad to help. So, for fee waivers, I found most of them on Reddit. Here is the link to the Reddit post that has all the fee waivers: Reddit - Dive into anything
This was where I found the majority of my fee waivers but I got a fee via emails from colleges and also some schools gave it out on webinars such as University of Pittsburgh. Best of luck!
Hey everyone, this isn’t an update post but rather a question that I would like to get some feedback and advice on. So, I’ve been admitted to both NC State (Engineering First Year) and UNC Chapel Hill and now, I’m not sure which one to pick. Both will be about the same cost and distance from home is relatively the same (about 15 mins away from NC State and 35 mins from UNC).
UNC really has the prestige factor which I really like, but NC State has such a strong engineering program. It won’t be hard for me to transition into the CS program at NCSU but I’m not sure how hard it’ll be at UNC. One of my goals is to pursue an MBA after undergrad and a business minor during undergrad, if that will affect anything in making a decision on what school to attend - I know Kenan-Flagler is one of the top business schools though.
I’ve asked a few people that go to UNC and most people preferred NC State. Even on Reddit, nearly everyone said to go to State. In terms of employability and being “well known,” which school is best? If I ever decide to go to the west coast for a job, will having the recognition of UNC be more advantageous than going to NC State (if NC State isn’t well known on the west coast)?
For engineering and CS, I would 100% pick NC State over UNC. Those two areas (among others) are NC State’s strengths. I believe UNC has very limited engineering options.
If you think you want to head the business school route, KF is hard to beat (keeping in mind that admission to KF is VERY competitive, and you’d be competing against other exceptional candidates).
Rankings can be misleading. Some schools are strong in AI while others are better at Security. You need to figure out what areas of CS you like then look at each school.
