NoPetrol

I'm just repeating what professors say about this place, but maybe they say that about their resident state no matter where they are, and maybe they wouldn't say that if they were at UF. Oh, and UF won't accept me to transfer. It's really strange that University of Maryland did.

Oh, a lot of debt. But the good news is I don't have any debt now because I had a scholarship throughout the time I wasted here at FAU. My understanding is that MIT, ect. turn away students with GPAs above 3.8 all the time. I know of people with high school honors GPAs above 5.0 who got rejected to their undergraduate programs. I actually got through to MIT's computer science graduate office over the phone once, and they told me that, even if I enrolled in another graduate program and later applied to theirs, my undergraduate performance would still be heavily weighted. My original plan was to start somewhere else and try to transfer there. Another flaw in that plan is that I do not have the educational foundations or research experience to excel in graduate school at this time, especially if I enroll as a non degree seeking student in a decent one. Oh, and I need to leave Florida. The culture here isn't exactly one that encourages discipline in academia. Or any form of intelligence.

Well, I'm asking this because I still don't know whether this plan is a good one, or whether I should just stay at this fourth-tier university I'm at for graduate school because I'm never going to get into one of the top universities anyway.

I am receiving a B.S. degree in computer science at the end of this summer. I know for certain that I am not the type of student that any top-tier graduate school wants to accept: my GPA is 3.0, I have completed very little research (a project that merely consisted of using genetic algorithms to populate a blackjack strategy card- definitely nothing groundbreaking), and am getting my degree from a fourth-tier dump in Florida that goes by the name of Florida Atlantic University. I am seriously considering getting a second undergraduate degree in physics. For some strange reason, the University of Maryland accepted me into their undergraduate program for the fall 2010 semester. An adviser there said I could have a B.S. in physics in two years. If, hypothetically, I were to earn a high GPA during the completion of my second degree and do research and get high GPA scores, is admission to a top university for physics or computer science, such as MIT, CalTech, Cornell, or Stanford still an impossible dream? My worries are that even if I were to get a 3.8 GPA, my total average GPA would still be below 3.5, and there is only one and a half years to go to the application deadline for these places. I'm afraid that my low GPA will discourage those undergraduate summer research programs from accepting me next year, so I won't have that on my transcript.