Would you add any schools to this list to visit?

Parents Forum
1

S16, High School junior… SAT range 1220-1330, GPA 4.2

Criteria:
(a) Strong Computer Science/Computer Engineering major
(b) Cybersecurity offering as a minor
© Data Science major or minor
(d) DIV1 Football is a must
(e) No schools north of New Jersey, nothing west of Ohio

Schools visited or on list:

  • Rutgers
  • UDEL
  • U Maryland (stretch)
  • Towson (safety)
  • ECU (safety)
  • Clemson (stretch)
  • U South Carolina
  • U Tennessee
  • Virginia Tech
  • JMU
  • University of South Florida
  • Purdue (exception to geography rule b/c their CS/CE program is awesome)
  • Elon
  • Penn State

Is there any hidden gems out there that somebody visited not in this list?

2

Will your son be retaking SATs? Some of these schools will be big reaches for CS (Purdue for sure). Don’t look at overall acceptance rates, look at the CS specific data.

3

He will take SATs at least one more time (depending on results). I know Purdue and VTech have much harder admission rates for their CS/CE departments. Maybe others too, but we are still exploring.

4

The biggest stretch that you have on your list is calling Rutgers DI football. :))

Are you willing to pay full price as an OOS?

5

Yeah, Rutgers football is, well, not good. That is the whole problem with NJ, not a lot of choices.

We are willing to pay full OOS as you can see from list above.

6

I wouldn’t exactly call Elon a football powerhouse either.

What about Ohio State?

7

Good point on Elon, I need to ask my son how that popped on there. Maybe the 65% - 35% girl to boy ratio?
Ohio State is reach plus not as strong CS/CE as other schools.

8

CS and CE programs are pretty equal across schools.

@CourtneyThurston any suggestions?

9

What is his unweighted GPA? 4.2 looks weighted.

You may want to look at University of Cincinnati. Likely in the match range.
Average admitted student has a 3.7 GPA (unweighted)
ACT: middle 50% of admitted Engineering & Applied Science students: 26-31
SAT: middle 50% of admitted Engineering & Applied Science students: 1160-1370

10

Besides the (admittedly earned) Rutgers comment, some of those other schools are not Div 1 Football. Pretty sure UDel, Towson, Elon, JMU are not.

11

@garland All of those 4 are Division 1 FCS football schools in the Colonial Athletic Association conference.

12

All great points on football. I just asked my son to clarify and got this:

“I would like to go to a school that has a big football following. A place where students get together”

So the school spirit matters.

13

Duh. Whoops. I was thinking IA only. My bad. Carry on! :slight_smile:

14

Whichever is cheapest. If you’re going for CS, you want the program to be accredited. Anything beyond that is icing.

Go to the cheapest, hopefully get an FA refund check, work on campus and bank it, get internships and bank them. It turns out pretty sweet if you do.

15

Also: don’t do cybersec or data-anything as an undergraduate major. Those are things you get graduate degrees in. In undergrad, you want to come out with a strong general foundation. Specializing too early–even if it’s just majoring in “software engineering” instead of “computer science”–is a mistake.

16

Not sure about the major, but what about Pitt? Great football, and I’ve heard great things. Not sure the SAT would be high enough but maybe take a look?

17

Pitt is a great option but like you said, more in the stretch side and he has too many in that side of the tracks already. Great city!

18

I I will politely disagree a bit on value of degrees Courtney. I am an IT executive and oversee a lot of hiring in my company. We are taking people in college to go right to Information Security or our Data Analytics teams. We are not asking for Masters, so skills they have in this area outside a general B.S. in just CS or CE gives you an advantage in the business world.

I will agree with you in if you 100% going after your Masters, the B.S. is not as important than.

In IT, the most important factor is experience. I look at a ton of resumes and spend 10 seconds on the degree and school. I rather see you did a COOP with somebody for 3-6 months rather than a Masters with zero practical experience.

19

University of Central Florida has a strong computer science program and does well in national level computer competitions (I think they beat MIT in one). They have an undergraduate certificate in cyber security and a cyber security graduate program. For Data Science they offer an undergraduate Data Science boot camp and graduate certificates/programs.

UCF also has D1 football and is a little more difficult to get into than USF. If you are touring USF anyway it wouldn’t be much out of the way.

Note that is more difficult to get in FL schools in general recently probably due to the increase in the Bright Future scholarship award amount.

20

Thank you Snowfern. UCF was on the list but pulled off once we found out only 18% or so of students live on campus and freshman is not guaranteed a room. I realize 18% of a large number of students still may be ok. I will see what son thinks.