International student applying to CS in the US

DadTwoGirls
Sun, 02 Mar 2025 17:31:06 +0000

One thing that I am wondering about…

abhs98:

…just starting my senior year.

abhs98:

I do not need any financial aid and was planning to apply for cs, data science and AI and wanted to apply to colleges like…

Are you planning on taking a gap year? If you are currently in your senior year, at this time of the year (March) it would be normal to already have applications in and have ED and EA results back. Are you a half-semester off for some reason? Do you graduate high school in spring of 2025, spring of 2026 or some other time?

This of course has some impact on the extent to which you still have time to think about which universities you want to apply to.

abhs98:

the budget is not an issue it just has to be a t20 cs school

For the purposes of getting a job in the USA, you are an international student and should not expect to be able to stay in the US after graduation except on a temporary visa for a short period of time. For the purpose of getting a job in India, I suppose that the reputation of the school in India matters, and I expect that most of us on this web site are not from India. For the purpose of convincing your parents or other relatives to pay for your education, I suppose that what matters is that they consider the school to be sufficiently prestigious (and that they can somehow come up with the money).

For the purpose of getting a very good education in computer science, pretty much any school that has been mentioned on this thread is excellent, and Rice specifically is excellent. There are some advantages of attending a relatively small school such as Rice (smaller classes and getting to know your professors can both be helpful). Since Rice is in Texas it will also have milder winters compared to some of the other schools named on this thread or that are well known for CS (obvious exceptions being Stanford and any University of California, but Stanford and the top ranked UCs are high reaches for pretty nearly everyone).

Rankings for computer science are generally not the same as rankings for a school overall. Generally hiring managers in software companies know how strong universities are for computer science, and really do not care about how strong a university is for anything else. However, there are a lot of universities that are very good for computer science.

If it were me, or my child, I might avoid applying ED anywhere, add U.Mass Amherst and Purdue to the list, and possibly add two or three schools in Canada to the list. However it is not me doing the applying. To answer the original question, I think that @abhs98’s chances applying ED to Rice are decent, and that Rice is a very good university and is very good for computer science, but it is not a safety. I would still want to add a few other schools to the list and make sure that you have a safety in your home country.