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Thank you, and I'm aware, just wanted to see if someone might go that "it won't get u to MIT, but perhaps waterloo"

Thank you for the advice, I guess I will go for research this summer, thing is, in those "projects" I did previously, I had to do readings, make design choices, implementations, experimentations, along with teams of 2-3 people, with of course a professor watching over the progress, do you think such projects would classify under research? I thought they might cause the experience wasn't really a streamlined straightforward kind of thing, it was moreof a "pick a project idea" then "see what others did" then "try to improve", it also involved things research usually involves, I meet with my mentor once a week to discuss my progress, I meet my supervising engineer more frequently to discuss more technical issues, you go in the project not knowing if any meaningful result could come out of it...etc Do you think I should capitalize on such ideas in my statement of purpose? or are they irrelevant? thanks again

Well, I'm a top class CS student in a five year program majoring in AI, I did several relatively big projects within coursework and some extracurricular, published a book about computer for children, I have 2 internships under my belt one in an ERP firm, the largest software firm where I come from, the other from a research house where I did socioeconomics, participated in programming contests, math contests and I'm very likely to graduate top of my class. I'm not an american and where I come from, research is very limited and the culture of working on a research in summer is inexistent. However I will try to do some research of my own this summer, my current project is on sentiment analysis in documents. Do I stand a chance in getting into a good financial engineering program? CMU, Berkley, Baruch...etc? What do you think would strengthen my application? Thanks alot

Well, I'm a top class CS student in a five year program majoring in AI, I did several relatively big projects within coursework and some extracurricular, published a book about computer for children, I have 2 internships under my belt one in an ERP firm, the largest software firm where I come from, the other from a research house where I did socioeconomics, participated in programming contests, math contests and I'm very likely to graduate top of my class. I'm not an american and where I come from, research is very limited and the culture of working on a research in summer is inexistent. However I will try to do some research of my own this summer, my current project is on sentiment analysis in documents. I'd appreciate some advice on what do you think I need most to strengthen my application, like everyone else, I dream of getting to one of the top schools, MS or PhD programs (preferably PhD), the likes of MIT, CMU, Berkley, Waterloo...etc Thanks alot