many cool niche courses related to data sci (sabermetrics 101)
decently respected name and solid alumni netowkr
opportunities in boston within the school ecosystem
bu cons:
55k/year after aid (money is a concern and id be taking out loans bc i want my parents to save their retirement funds; parents would pay maybe 10-20k/year)
cold and far from home
ucsc pros:
full ride
warm and close to home
ucsc cons:
they dont have my major (statistics/data science) and they only have applied math + ml classes arent really available for undergrads
job outcomes arent that great
this is kinda stupid but the culture is very like party/weed oriented and im not that type of person
Go to UCSC. You most likely can’t, and definitely shouldn’t, take out $35K/ year for undergrad. Federal loans are limited to $27K TOTAL for undergrad. I believe a number of your other observations about Santa Cruz are inaccurate (you will be taught by professors, TAs will likely lead discussions and grade your assignments; I’m not sure what the job outcome is based on; etc).
I hate to be a buzzkill, but this really isn’t feasible. You’re talking about $140K-$180K of debt for an undergrad degree, plus cost increases. Apart from how life-limiting this debt would be after college, only $27K of it could be borrowed by you independently; your parents would have to cosign for the rest, which could still compromise their financial position.
Also, a full ride at UCSC is a score! You can get to a data science career with a UCSC applied math degree. And there are plenty of people at UCSC who aren’t party/weed oriented. If you have a full ride, wouldn’t you also be in honors housing?
Here’s another possibility to consider: Domestic Exchange Programs UNH has an undergrad data science program. You could spend a semester or a year in New Hampshire, get your New England fix, and supplement your applied math coursework with whatever data science classes Santa Cruz doesn’t offer.
If your parents can pay $20K a year, now you’re out $35K a year - so that’s $140K in loans and yet you can only borrow $27K total over four years - and even that is too much.
So you have no choice but to take the full ride- and by full ride I hope you mean it includes housing!!!
There is no scenario here where BU has an advantage…not even close!! And they have a grad program in stats and you can potentially take some classes.
BU really can’t be in the consideration set at all!!
Great get at UCSC - and best of luck. Talk to professors and advisors - I’m sure you can get some related content to your needs!!
UCSC for the win. Huge congratulations on that. Now make special things happen. Get involved in the college community. Internships /job’s love that. Go on Facebook and find your peeps and when you start college. They are there. Don’t want to party. Then don’t. Join clubs /activities that are centered towards your goals and do some stuff just because and have some fun. Just remember this… Free money is sorta the best money to have. You will be so much ahead of your friend’s at graduation. It’s really a gift and a huge opportunity especially during this current climate. Be happy and move forward
If these two universities cost the same, this could be a tough decision.
As it is, it is a no brainer. You just plain cannot afford to attend BU. The amount of debt that you would need to take on would be very bad, and there is a very real risk that you would get part way through the program having already run up quite a bit of debt, and find that you just could not find anyone to lend you enough money to complete your degree.
There will be some partying and some weed and some drinking at any school. I remember seeing a bit of this at BU when I was in university across the river. You just avoid it and stick with your plan to study and get a solid undergraduate education.
As an undergraduate student I majored in math, with a focus on applied math. This can set you up for a good job in any one of many possible areas, and can also set you up for a graduate degree in statistics, or data science, or machine learning, or AI, or operations research (you should find out what this is), or any one of quite a few other areas. There are a lot of fields that use math and that are in need of people who know math quite well.
UC Santa Cruz is a very good university in a very attractive location. Congratulations! Do the very best that you can there and it will give you a very good start on your career.
I think the decision is a no-brainer. Take the full ride and run with it. Don’t worry about the “major.” I do data science for a living. No one I ever worked with ever had a degree in data science. Just get proficient in SQL. It’s fairly easy to get your foot in the door with data. There’s a lot of specialties. Most computer science degrees will have everything you need. Plus you might find out later you don’t like data science. It’s not for everyone. It’s dry and boring. Just get a good general CS degree. That will make you more versatile when you look for jobs.
i didn’t get into cs at ucsc i got into applied math (and you can’t switch into cs there). my main concern was that i’m gonna be wasting my time learning math that isn’t useful and not get the expertise in sql ml and python as it isn’t part of their apma program
There is no such thing as wasting time in math. It’s all relevant. Take a class on health policy or genetics or sustainability or urban planning or Chinese history and you’ll be highly employable regardless of the name of the major.
There is a lot of math that can be useful to a software engineer, and that was useful when I was employed as a software engineer. Software languages change over time and fashion. You learn a new one. The underlying math that backs almost everything up is not very likely to change. As some examples, it can be very useful to be familiar with calculus, differential equations, multi-variate calculus, linear algebra, probability and statistics, discrete math, graph theory and/or networking algorithms. You might want to see if you can take an introductory course in artificial intelligence and/or machine learning and/or operations research and/or data science. There is a lot of math that is interesting and that is also useful on the job (I think that I just named about 11 or 12 math classes, which is about half of what I ended up taking across bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and I have used most of it).
Of course there are a lot of different types of software engineering jobs. To me the jobs that included quite a bit of math were the ones that were interesting.
There has been talk of AI taking over software engineering jobs. Personally I am skeptical. I have seen cases where AI tried to do math, and generally found it to be not very good. Unfortunately it can sound authoritative even when it is entirely wrong. Having the ability to spot what is wrong is a skill that is very likely to be useful in the future. I expect that there will continue to be quite a bit of math required to do this.
I did years ago (before AI was expected to program anything) have a few situations on a job where we were using canned software programs to solve a problem, and were getting very weird results that did not look right. It took quite a bit of knowledge of math to figure out what the software was doing and why this was wrong (and then we gave up on the canned software and wrote our own). In each case the problem was that the mathematical assumptions that had been programmed into the canned off-the-shelf software just did not fit the problem that we were trying to solve. Understanding the details of this can however be a challenge (and in many cases a fun challenge, and our management was happy in each case when we figured out what the problem was).
It’s frustrating to have an acceptance someplace you prefer but can’t afford. Unfortunately, with a $55Kx4 cost gap between your two options, and a <20Kx4 budget, that’s your situation. Fortunately, your free option is not actually an inferior school!
Looking at the curriculum for applied math, I am not seeing wasted time. These core classes are all valuable background. Looking at the upper-division electives, there is a ton of flexibility here. And given the amount of flexibility that’s written into the curriculum plan, I’m betting that you could petition to include classes from other schools as upper-division electives, if you really can’t find what you want/need at Santa Cruz. With the gift of a full ride, you have your parents’ entire college budget for you to work with; you could go anywhere in the summers and take classes. This includes all of the other UC’s, the CSU’s, and even BU if they offer classes you want in the summer when enrollment is open to all.. and many others. I know that UW-Seattle, for example, has a huge array of open-enrollment summer classes. So, if there are gaps in terms of specific classes you want to take, you can afford to go find them elsewhere. Plus there’s the UNH exchange option during the year, that I already linked to; your scholarship would cover this. (And from UNH, you can not only get to the cool NH city of Portsmouth easily, but you can also get into Boston on the train in <90 minutes.) There may also be study-abroad programs that would fit what you’re looking for.
You can make this work, and you will have a well-respected degree with great Silicon Valley connections. There is nothing about the specific BU degree that is worth starting out your adult life in six figures of debt, to which your parents would also be obligated.