Suggestions for safety/match for computer science

aquapt
Mon, 29 Oct 2018 17:32:58 +0000

Should I take from your screen name that you’re female? Scripps College is a match where you’d have a decent chance of merit aid (up to half tuition), and where you could major in CS through either Harvey Mudd or Pomona. The Claremont Colleges are excellent for CS and meet your climate parameters perfectly. (Also Common App.) Of course you can also apply to Mudd and/or Pomona directly, but you said you already have reaches, and merit is a lot harder to come by at Mudd and nonexistent at Pomona.

Seconding Santa Clara. Also, the UC system, while not Common App, has one application for all nine campuses. They’re expensive and offer no merit for OOS students, but since you don’t have a firm out-of-pocket limit… UC Santa Cruz would be a safety for you and is a great CS school, although it tends more toward redwoods than palms. And if you were doing the application to nail down that safety, you could also check the boxes to apply to as many of the reachier campuses as you wanted. You sound like you might love Santa Barbara and/or Irvine, as well as UCLA and UCSD. Look in particular at the Computing major in the College for Creative Studies at UCSB https://ccs.ucsb.edu/majors/computing - this requires another layer of application, but could be well worth the effort.

Also, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has an excellent CS program and the campus/weather are gorgeous. The only caveat is that gender parity in the CS department starts out bad and gets worse, as attrition is higher for women. If you are game to confront male-dominated CS culture head-on, though, it’s a great school. (In stark contrast to Harvey Mudd which actually has a slight female majority in CS.) San Diego State is another worth looking at in the Cal State system. The CSU system has its own app but it’s probably less than an hour’s project to fill out. (Just DO NOT neglect to include your middle school math and foreign language classes - many a hapless Cal Poly applicant has lost the acceptance they should have gotten over those lost course-rigor points. And CS is the most competitive major at SLO so you need full credit for your stats.)

Other warm-weather public safeties would include Arizona State’s Barrett Honors College, and UNLV (both Nevada campuses have strong CS but Las Vegas is much warmer than Reno).