pentaprism

I'm not sure about this. Due to schedule constrain, my D didn't take OS for her undergrad degree. Last year she was admitted to CS PhD program at Univ. of Washington, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Univ. of Texas in Austin, UC San Diego, and Princeton She was a strong candidate, however: 3.9 GPA from a top-5 CS school, 2 yrs research, and strong recommendations from renowned professors.

While SSD is a worthwhile option, don't order it from the place you buy your laptop from. If you're tech-savvy, you can save some money by upgrading the harddrive yourself. I notice that the price difference for a laptop with 500 GB magnetic harddrive and one with 256 GB SSD is about $250. For the same amount of money, you can get a 512 GB SSD. In other words, if you can upgrade the harddrive yourself, for the price Dell (or any other laptop maker) charges you for a 256 GB SSD, you can get a 512 GB SSD, and a 500 GB magnetic drive as a backup disk. I've done this for 3 laptops.

My friend's son didn't have interview nor any contact from UCLA (computer science). and haven't heard from them about his application. It's moot because he's already committed to a better (for him) school anyway.

My friend's son received the admitance email to CMU CS Ph.D. program (ACO I think) almost 2 weeks ago. The "open house" is March 2-3.

I'm with the philosophy that the easier you make someone else's life to be, the easier (s)he will make your life to be. I'd give each of the LoR writer a package that includes: (1) A cover letter, (2) A copy of my CV, (3) A copy of my SOP, (4) A copy of my transcript, (5) A list of the schools I'm applying to, with LoR deadline for each school. The cover letter has a photo of me, and details of what I did in his/her class/lab, and of course a "thank you." It also confirms his/her contact data that I input in the applications. A professor has a lot of people asking her/him to write LoR, why not make it easier for her/him to do so for you?

Use it to your advantage. In your SOP, there should be a paragraph about how you are prepared for grad school; in that paragraph, insert something like this: "to explore and to prepare for what I would do for undergrad and grad studies, during highschool, I took a lot of classes at XXX, a local comunity college. I did not do extremely well in some of those classes, in particular those in chemistry and in biology, but I discovered that I liked computer science, and decided to pursue it....."

I'm not sure how to define "big words." A word may appear "big" to one person but is just a day-to-day word to another. Think of a SOP as a research proposal. Use the same language as you would in a research paper. I don't expect an arts major student to understand a research proposal in computer science.

I don't know about now, but when I took GRE years ago, I was told (officially, in some document) that some of the questions in the test were "experimental." Those questions had score of 0. In other words, they didn't count. Could some of the questions your bf got wrong "experimental"?

Use the data on his/her business card.