.letmeinplz//

In that case you can check out csrankings and select the areas you are interested in and see where they stand compared to other departments (or if there are even professors there doing research in those areas).

Why would you apply if it wasn't worth the time and effort?

You should contact some current students in your program (I was passed several names to contact with any grad life questions I had once I accepted my offer) and see what their advice is, since they will know about your program better than any of us could guess.

Accredited by some regional accreditation agency.

Q1: Sure, but most programs reserve TA positions for PhD students who need it (since they are guaranteed funding). For RA funding that come from grants, usually the professor chooses who they want, so if you are doing research with a professor you might be able to snag an RA position. Q2: Most programs I've applied to (back when I was applying for MS) had some kind of path for MS -> PhD. My current program the path is "get recommended by your thesis committee for continuance", basically do well and you can change to PhD.

If WUSTL is 100% funded, then there. St. Louis isn't the best city but WUSTL is a great school.

What is even your goal? A terminal MEng degree and a research oriented degree probably have the same value (+2) in industry if you are just going to be a developer at Google, etc. If your plan is to continue on to a PhD, a more research oriented degree could help you get the research experience (and connections) admissions committees want (what I did to get into my new program). That said you can still do independent research with professors in terminal degrees too, they just don't usually require a thesis. But if your plan is to simply get a job, both will do fine (so take the money).

I think that it is a common situation for masters programs. Where I am getting my MS, TAship goes to PhD students who need it first. You can get a RA position but that decision comes from the professor with the funds to do so. It would be scary if you were in a PhD program, but a fellowship covering your tuition + some extra money is a pretty good deal.

Yeah I don't know, I've personally seen someone choose a school because it was an Ivy even though the other school eclipsed it (like top 1 school). I think people confuse undergrad prestige with graduate prestige. Though I'm not sure even that matters since companies are looking for specific skills (like CS, EE, etc) and so they are judging your university based on that, not some general undergrad metric of 'prestige'.

Look up the research they do and see if you are interested. You can look at sites like csrankings to rank those schools by top SWE publications and then click on each professor to take a peek at their work. Other than fit you should look at things like cost, living, etc but you haven't given any info on preferences.

If the school is part of the CGS res (with your deadline they probably are) backing out of an accepted offer after April 15th requires a written release. If your plan is to accept both and then tell funded choice you are leaving if you get external funding and telling unfunded school no if you don't get external funding, you will be burning bridges no matter what you do. Take the funded offer (they funded you because they want you).

I'm finishing up my MS CS at NCSU right now. Answered some of your concerns in red below.

Personally, never 3 (academic incest, expand your connections by moving on to other places). 1 seems like the best fit, if you are nervous about what seems like initial lack of interest remember that professors get really busy so they might have just had to put you on the back burner until they got through paper submissions or other deadlines. You will probably get more of their attention once you are producing research with them. Small cohort, most money, and least amount of coursework all sounds pretty good too.

Try checking out csrankings which ranks schools based on publications in top conferences, filtered by area. You can then look at each school to see a list of professors that are publishing so you can click them to go to their site and see if your interested in their work. Personally I would choose UCSD

QoP: Seems like Wisconsin wins here if you truly aren't interested in the 'hot topic'. Ment: Wisconsin seems to win but don't discount younger professors, they usually are very energetic in getting new and impactful projects done. Connections are nice, but it is possible someone putting out highly cited work is also forming those connections. Rest: Michigan seems to have a clear edge here (other than no first year fellowship and proximity to Detroit, but RA is good experience). I think taking your spouses QoL and career into account is important (I only applied to places where mine could get good work so no small college towns for me) and visiting AP/Fellow won't dampen their career goals as much as not being able to find anything close to what they want to do. You probably can't go wrong with the research experience and education you are going to get from both universities, so if you make your final decision on what is best for both of you, you might be happier with the result.

When you got your current decision. If your acceptance of an offer really is hinging on another program rejecting you then contact them for an update (could say something like: I have been accepted to a program but before making final decisions I would like to hear from X University. Do you have a timeline on when I will be notified of the admission decision?). If an acceptance from another school won't change your mind on committing to a current acceptance though, probably not worth spending time on schools taking too long to notify you.

1. What matters more is your work and your connections you make within your department and outside with other Universities. That said, usually higher ranked schools have more opportunities which can help if you want to go on to academia. But you can still be incredibly successful no matter where you go. And if your goal is to work at Google or some other industry research lab, rank probably matters even less. 2. Depends on both of you. Is living through a smartphone screen on skype/facetime doable for most of your time? You will still get to visit with each other so it isn't like it is 5 solid years apart. But if one of you thinks they couldn't do it, it probably isn't worth it. 3. I had already spoken to my SO and agreed that if we had to, it would be fine to live apart. But I fly on airlines for free and I also have my pilots license (in case I wanted to rent a cessna instead), so distance isn't really that distant for me. If you guys don't have the funds or ability to make trips to see each other, I personally would just take CU-B (I mean it is still a great school even if it isn't as great as UIUC).

If you look at top ML conferences (csrankings) Columbia is 7th while Duke is 48th, which makes Duke pretty good but Columbia is great. Also depending on if you care about location, Durham vs NYC is something you should think about. That said, if PhD is your endgame here, go to Duke unless you've spoken to people at Columbia on how easy it is to transfer to PhD from MS (for my program it is just getting a recommendation from the thesis committee). I also wouldn't consider what people know in your country, instead worry about what the companies/organizations know about each school.

I don't know about you, but the thesis I just defended required more code than I wrote for any course projects during my MS courses and undergrad. If you don't have any industry experience I would try to line up an internship during your masters or the summer after you graduate. But even if you don't find one, getting your MS puts you on the "recent grads" category of jobs which rarely requires experience and instead, you will just need the skillset they want (Java, docker, etc) and your interviews will be more code and whiteboard based than experience based.

duolingo

I used to live in Atlanta, the living cost is only high if you choose to live in midtown (where tech is) but you can live anywhere on the marta line which runs through some inexpensive places (if you only want public transport). Theoretically you could even live in Bankhead (next to tech) for really cheap, but then you'd live in Bankhead. Both GT and UIUC have great names, you just have to decide on research fit and what city (or small college town for UIUC) you want to live in for 5 years.

might be hard, maybe try DSLRs that can record video as well (but they also seem to have mics). or perhaps security cams that don't have mics?

You can, it is just a little more involved than a chrome extension. I mean I guess they changed the way they deliver their ads (it used to be those hijack ads that would open app store / play store to some app or to a "device has been infected, please download this virus to fix"), but I'm not sure rotten tomato and upskirt ads are much better. They changed the domain that the ads are served from to thegradcafe.com (rather than the usual domains that are already blocked by easylist/etc).

I never understand these questions... You obviously researched each school and selected them based on some metrics (fit, prestige, whatever) over schools you didn't apply to. Use those same metrics to compare your acceptances too. We don't know where you fit better, where you have better funding, or what type of city you want to live in (protip: LA and DC are very different cities), especially with no information given about any of these things.

"being processed" per: