Solid High School Course Plan? Areas for Improvement? [high school in Ontario, Canada]

DadTwoGirls
Fri, 09 May 2025 14:49:44 +0000

APRecess:

I plan on applying to T30 universities (primarily in the U.S.) as a Computer Science major.

To me your coursework looks fine. It seems that you will get as far as AP Calculus, which is fine. I also see four years of French. In the US they will consider this as counting as a foreign language, and four years of it is also good.

Does you high school not have AP Physics? Also, can you take “Pre-AP Advanced Functions / Math” and “AP Calculus” at the same time? Are these considered independent parallel courses, or is one a prerequisite for the other? You will want to do very well on all of the prerequisites for calculus before you take calculus.

One thing that I do not see here is a discussion of budget. University in the US is EXPENSIVE. There are only a tiny number of universities that meet full need for international students, and all of them are very highly competitive for admissions, even for the strongest students. At this point in the US there are already some private universities that are very close to US$100,000 per year, and the cost has been increasing relatively rapidly. By the time that you get there four years of university in the US could cost close to US$500,000, and of course the exchange rate is not in your favour. Some top schools in the US do meet full need for international students, but you would need to get your parents to run the NPC to see whether or not you would qualify for financial aid, and if so how much. If you Google “net price calculator Harvard university” you will for example find the NPC for Harvard.

However, you have multiple universities in Canada that are excellent for CS, and also excellent for other related topics such as mathematics and AI and machine learning. Toronto and Waterloo come to mind, although of course Queens, McMaster, McGill, UBC, and multiple other universities are also excellent. Both employers and graduate schools in the US know how strong the Canadian universities are. Toronto of course counts as “Top 30” both overall and for CS, and Waterloo is “top 30” for CS. The other Canadian universities on this list are not very far behind.

Which leads to another issue. As an international student in the US, you will most likely be required to return home to Canada after graduation from a university in the US. Getting a degree from a university in the US does not make it easy to get a job in the US. At least in my experience from many, many years ago, as a Canadian who graduated from MIT, it is probably easier to get a job in Canada if you graduate from university in Canada rather than graduating from a “top 30” (or even “top 5”) university in the US.