Profile Evaluation - Safe Universities for MS in CS

[Fall2018]

Hi all! 

I have my GRE in a month and I am having a freakout in terms of my preparation. On the test day they give you an option to send your scores to 4 universities for free. I have been trying to figure out 4 safe universities for my profile, but all options I considered earlier have very low acceptance rate. 

Can you please help me find out some safe universities for my profile, or point me in the correct direction? Thanks so much in advance.

 

Here's my profile:

• GRE practice tests - 322 manhattan, 320 (3.5 awa) princeton review 
• I national conference paper
• 1 year experience (will be 2 at time of joining - fall 2019) at fortune 500 company
• internships in all 3 years - 1st yr at startup, 2nd yr at ngo, 3rd year at above company
• ~80-82% undergrad
• Did some relevant nanodegree courses with scholarship, and another relevant professional course from a top 5 college in India.
• Anything else I forgot to mention? I'll add in comments...

Looking for masters program in computer science.

 

Edited February 19, 2018 by Fall2018

[spamhaus]

It really depends on what you mean by "safe". The safest schools are likely the ones with the highest acceptance rates, which typically are not very competitive schools. The best way to pick schools, is to research them yourself. I quite literally looked at ALL the US schools on csrankings.org, which is a merit based ranking of universities by publications in top conferences. You can then select your areas of interest, and look at the various schools and their rankings.

Obviously, the higher the school's ranking the more competitive the program, the harder it will be to get in. So you can go through the list a bit, and sample what the admissions requirements are for various universities. For example, Auburn which is ranked last on that list for US schools, simply wants a 3.0 GPA and > 300 combined GRE. Seems pretty safe given your profile, but it may not be ambitious enough. Looking near the middle of the list, University of Florida states the average for accepted students is 3.3 GPA and 317 combined GRE (153V/164Q).

I guess my take-away is, we cannot tell you what sort of school is a safe school you would be happy with. Rather research it given the above tools and you can make an informed decision. Best of luck!