Hello,
I’m currently entering my Senior year a state university with a slightly above average EECS department. My university isn’t really involved with the research I’m interested in, and this Fall I’m going to be sending out applications for Master’s programs. I wanted to know which ones were realistic with someone with my stats to enter, to make sure that I’m not wasting my time/money applying to places that aren’t within reach.
I have a 3.6 overall GPA, 3.8 major GPA. I’ve had cyber security research experience at a National Laboratory (mostly related to cloud computing and SCADA systems), and I’m currently working at the same laboratory in software development and big data analytics. I’ve got good references from the laboratory, I don’t think I’ll have issues with recommendations or student involvement/leadership. However, I’m mostly concerned that I’ll be skipped over due to lack of university research/GRE scores.
I think realistically my max GRE scores would be around 160 verbal and 155 analytical. I’ve never been a very good test taker, and my background in math is not where it should be. I haven’t been involved with research at my university because I’ve been trying to focus on my grades during the year. I’m worried I’ll be passed over by many schools because I didn’t do research at my university / my scores will be too low.
The scores I was primarily interested in were Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, and NYU since they’re all pretty strong in cyber security. I’m worried however that they’ll want students from better schools with better GRE scores and university research though. It’s pretty difficult to find hard admittance stats for these schools, so I don’t really know what type of competition I’d be facing for them. I’m probably not going to be considered at by ivy leagues and schools like UCBerkley or Stanford, but I’d like to go the best school I can for my Master’s.
Any advice on where I should set my expectations or for things I can do in the mean time to improve my chances of getting into one of these schools? Should I spend my senior year doing research at my university even if it’s not related to what I want to do? Thanks.
erasing my answer, mispost
I don’t know too much about MS as my student went directly to PhD route
iirc Berkeley only offers the MS as a professional program, not a reserach degree except in limited
CMU is ranked #1 in grad rankings so presumably it is harder to get accepted than ivies.
You say you have research and if you are doing research, not internship then I don’t know that it matters that you are doing it elsewhere. Doing any research in CS at your uni should be helpful e-ven if it isn’t exactly what you are interested in studying for grad school. It gives you the opportunity to get a letter that evaluates your research abilities and potential rather than the less useful did-well-in-class generic letter.
I agree, you should try to get involved in some kind of research in the Fall. This will hopefully get you a more personal letter. You can already expect a good letter from the National Laboratory, right?
After that, make sure you practice for the GRE. You will need to have a strong quantitative score for the highly selective programs that you are listing. You should definitely apply to your preferred programs but you have a decision to make about other programs. You could find one or two acceptable (to you) programs which are not as selective and which you are sure you can enter or you can look for a job and postpone a graduate degree until you have some experience to add onto your academic credentials.
Yeah, I’ve already gotten very good ones from the researchers I’ve worked with and my managers. As for the GRE, I’ve been spending the month practicing and planning on taking it early August. As for less competitive schools, would you have any suggestions? I was thinking I might be able to get into the lesser UCs, or smaller state schools.I really don’t want to have to go to a school I’m not interested in though, but again I don’t want to have to earn a Master’s when I’ve already started a career.
You can, of course do an online professional degree while you are working and there are a number of such programs from quite good universities. I think the best thing is to identify the universities that you are interested in attending and then look at their oveall ranking in CS. You can use [url="<a href=“http://phds.org%22%5DPhDs.org%5B/url”>http://phds.org"]PhDs.org[/url] or US News for general rankings as a guide. Remember thatif you aredoing a professional degree without thesis, you will likely need to self-fund but if you need to have funding, it is likely that you will need to do a research-oriented degree at a school without a Ph.D. program.