mariposa2

@political I received an invite for Princeton QCB in mid-December. The visit is February 5th. All the best!

I received an email invitation to interview this afternoon. I hope you hear back soon, and all the best! The interview is February 7-9th.

Is it customary for students who hope to interview at several institutions to respond affirmatively right away to interview invites as they arrive and resolve conflicts as they might arise by re-scheduling with institutions whose requests come in later?

I suggest #1, as I think the Q score is the most important of the three in this field. If you demonstrate high fluency in your written material, and/or your recommenders highlight situations where you have demonstrated excellent communication skills, that may alleviate concerns about your low V and AW. Also, if you can, ask a faculty member on the MSCS application review committee at your home institution how they react to getting scores like yours (or ask your academic advisor to ask them).

I am certain there are some employers who consider applicants without CS degrees, provided they have a technical repertoire and the right personality for the company's environment. Software dev is very likely to involve team work on large-scale projects, so you will probably have to interact with clients, project managers, sales and marketing folks, and teammates in this vocation too! Perhaps you could hone your skills with courses from lynda, Coursera, edX (those are the first ones that come to mind) work on open-source projects, and offer your services to a nonprofit (they will probably be quite patient with a beginner and grateful for any contribution you can make). I think that you may want to look into design principles (called "patterns") as well as computer science theory and algorithms as you consider this job. Even if these do not seem relevant to the technical skills you seek to acquire, in my opinion a software developer benefits from foundations in design and theory, in addition to the mechanics of programming. All the best to you!

Hoping to bring this topic back as the application season approaches! I'm applying to both computer science and computational biology PhD programs. My interests are in genomics, algorithms, and bioinformatics software development. I'm generally interested in the following programs: Johns Hopkins CS, Stanford CS, University of Washington Genome Sciences (maybe CS), WashU/WUSTL CB, USC CB, Princeton QCB (maybe CS), UC Berkeley CB. For perspective: I'm getting a 4-year BS + MS in Computational Biology at a private university well-known in CS and CB. Ugrad GPA 3.7, solid GRE, TA experience, 2 years comp bio research at my home institution plus conference poster, and a highly regarded biology summer REU. What programs are you all looking at?