dntw8up

I did K-12 in SF and undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is a great town with plenty to do socially, and if you think an occasional two hour trip to the beach or mountains is a hassle, you underestimate the hassle of living in SF and taking classes at Cal and/or Stanford. It sounds like UNC is a far better research fit for you, which is what matters most, and UNC professors are well-connected to biotech work being done by international firms in RTP. I wouldn't hesitate to trade the perceived status of one program for a program with more research depth in your area because that program will be better able to help you reach your professional goals. In fact, I have made the same choice in favor of the program I am entering this fall.

Maybe you can pick-up the undergraduate courses somewhere during the summer?

If you aren't being considered for retail and data-entry jobs because you're "overqualified", consider applying for those jobs without disclosing your educational background.

You're being paranoid.

Trust your gut; a large upswing in your major GPA will give admissions committees sufficient confidence that you're ready for graduate work in the field.

If you paid the application fee you applied, so you would check the "yes" box. You do not need to address it in your SoP; doing so would waste precious space where you could be discussing something that matters.

If you paid the application fee you applied. If you did not pay the fee you did not apply. Whether you sent all of the required support for your application after you applied isn't the question they're asking.

My $0.02: U.S. schools expect all recommendations to come from professors, but will occasionally make an exception and permit one from an employer. A recommendation from a family friend is not acceptable and will suggest to those making the admissions decisions that you haven't made an effort to understand the process.

A recommendation from a professor you only had for one class isn't likely to be very strong, so it's not worth any extra $. Ideally your recommenders will have advised you academically, taught several of your classes, worked with you on a project outside of class, or something else that enabled them to get a sense for your suitability for graduate work. You want recommenders who can write something more than "did well in class."

Your best bet is to get recommendations from professors who know your work well, even if that work is in a different field, so I suggest you choose professors from classes in your undergraduate major.

Nobody said recommendations are "the best way or the only way", and that line of thought is irrelevant because this discussion is not about ideal grad school admission processes. No, I'm not. Since recommendation letters are a factor in admissions decisions among the vast majority of U.S. schools, they are part of what gets people in or keeps people out of grad school. Obviously this means letters have a direct impact on the "current demographic in computer science", because nobody with a U.S. grad degree in cs would have that degree without those letters. There are other methods of evaluation, and some of them may be equally reliable, but we do not know that for a fact, and there is certainly no evidence that face-to-face time would be the "best" metric for grad school admissions. Everyone has biases, and eliminating face-to-face interviews eliminates the influence some irrelevant biases have historically had on admission decisions. Further, given that so many U.S. universities struggle with grad student TAs who have a poor command of the English language, I suspect that face-to-face interviews would actually have a negative effect on international admissions. I am not making any sort of value judgment of the process; I'm just stating facts. It makes no difference to me what metric universities use; I'm simply observing facts about the metric being used. U.S. grad schools use an admissions metric that includes letters of recommendation; therefore, recommendations helped make it possible for admitted applicants to gain admission; therefore recommendations made possible the U.S. graduate education necessary for RJB's perceived outpacing of "IT/computer science" among Indians and Chinese. Lastly, you can not possibly know that using a different metric would lead to the same or similar results. Your remark is simply conjecture.

The structure of departments is irrelevant; it is the responsibility of undergraduates who want to go to graduate school to foster relationships with professors. It's a necessary skill for academics to develop these sorts of relationships. Undergraduates who are uncomfortable doing so, and unwilling to seek out ways to educate themselves about the process so that they feel more comfortable, do not belong in grad school.

Your question suggests that you are unaware that letters of recommendation don't just evaluate the student; they also evaluate the recommender. In addition to evaluating qualities of applicants, recommendation letters make it possible for admissions committees to calibrate the recommender and his/her institution. Grad school application readers can't be familiar with every letter writer and every institution, so they can't judge what any statements mean relative to their own standards. Therefore, graduate schools care not only what the letter writer thinks of the student, but also about their own perceptions of the letter writer. Since admissions committees are not familiar with all U.S. universities, and even less familiar with all foreign universities, letters of recommendation clearly helped make it possible for Indians and Chinese who attended grad school in the U.S. to accomplish the "IT/computer science" out-pacing that RJB perceives.

There is a preponderance of Indian and Chinese names among graduate students and professors in my field (CS), suggesting that any perceived "IT/computer science" outpacing can be credited to educations provided by U.S. universities, all of which require(d) letters of recommendation.

GRE exams taken in 2012 are unlikely to be scored before application deadlines.

The paper-based GRE revised General Test is not offered in areas of the world where computer-based testing is available. The testing dates/sites in the link are for GRE subject exams.

I too would like to know what constitutes a "pretty good" subject GRE score for cs.

I just called and the subject test scores from the October test are available by phone.

I'm impatient, so I'm paying the twelve bucks on Monday to get mine!

The information is here: http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/scores/services/ You make the request in writing and include a check for $55.

I too have a shockingly low AW score and an extremely high verbal score. After reading this post I did some research on e-reader technology. When signing up for the exam I read the generic information ETS supplies about its scoring of the exam: "For the Analytical Writing section, each essay receives a score from two trained readers...trained to assign scores on the basis of the overall quality of an essay in response to the assigned task. If the two assigned scores differ by more than one point on the scale, the discrepancy is adjudicated by a third GRE reader." http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/scores/how/ Note that e-rater technology isn't mentioned. After seeing this post I poked around the ETS site using the buzz word "e-rater", a made-up word you have to know to locate the information, and found this: "...Currently, the e-rater technology will flag essays that demonstrate a wide range of anomalous conditions, including excessive brevity, excessive length, significant repetition of material and responses determined to be off-topic...The e-rater engine is currently used...in conjunction with human raters to score the essay portions of the TOEFL and GRE tests." http://www.ets.org/erater/about/faq/ Note that how e-reader technology is used relative to human readers isn't mentioned I'm a cs/math person writing an undergraduate thesis that has been praised for the quality of its writing. I was confident that I'd scored well on the AW portion of the exam, but I can easily imagine an e-reader perceiving my conciseness as excessive brevity. Since ETS seems to be hiding the role of automated essay grading from its customers I have requested a human review of my AW score.

There are few places that fund MS slots, and applicants for those tend to have higher stats. Since money is a concern it sounds like San Jose State is the most financially feasible option because you would not have to move. It's not Stanford or Cal, but it is well-known in SV.

The ETS site contains examples of essays with each of the possible scores. Reading them will provide you with an idea of what's expected.

Email them and ask for appointments to discuss grad school recommendations.

Duke publishes the information here: http://tinyurl.com/3wp3f7e