Please evaluate my profile and suggest schools

[kalai_nalla]

Hi,

I am planning to apply MS CS for FALL 2012.

I graduated from one of top 5 schools in India with 9.43/10 CGPA in 2010. I did my internship in a Networking Company for 6 months in Application Development and as an employee in the same field for 1 and half years. I would like to specialize in Software Engineering as my career goal is to be a Technical lead.

My GRE score is 1270 (770 Q + 500 V, 3.5 AWA). I know i scored less in verbal since I dint have much time to prepare. I have not done any papers though submitted 1 in SOA Architecture in a conference but actively participated in inter college programming competitions and SE contests and won prizes. I secured 95 % in 10th and 96% in 12th board exams. I dont have my TOEFL score yet.

The universities I have shortlisted are as follows. Please assess my chances.

CMU -MSE (2 years Work Exp course)

University of Illinois Urbana champaign -MS CS

Wisconson -

Purdue

TAMU

Ohio state university

Stony brook

University of Florida

UCLA

University of Texas Austin

Georgia Tech

It would be great if someone can suggest me schools that are extremely good in SE research with some aid !

Thanks a lot .. .

[nvseal]

Hi Kalai,

I can't speak to all those schools but I am currently a masters student at UT Austin and my profile was as follows:

American who attended a small US regional university for undergrad

One sole author paper published

No internships, just some freelancing work

GRE: 770Q/520V/4.5W

GPA: 3.72 total/3.95 CS

Focus: AI, NLP

I was also accepted at Brown but rejected from UIUC, MIT and Stanford.

Hopefully this helps a bit.

[kalai_nalla]

Thanks nvseal !

Your profile is very much similar to mine But I do understand SOP and LORs make a lot of difference! How is funding at UT Austin ? Also, how specific you have to be in your SOP. For example , will it do if i focus on Software Engineering or a particular research in SE that I am interested in ? I dont want to be too specific because that increases my chances of not getting admitted.

[nvseal]

I don't really know too much about the funding for masters students here, at least as far as how many of them are funded or not. I do know that there are masters who have TA positions and you can sign up to try to receive one. I do not have one at the moment.

I don't really know if there is a golden rule to how specific you want to make be in your SOP outside of answering the question "what should I say so that the committe gets a good and accurate sense of who I am and what I'm about?". The most important thing is how you present yourself. e.g. does your specific research focus come across as if you don't care about anything except a single subject (which could seem too limited) or do you like x sub-field and y topic of that sub-field in particular. Then again, if you really only want to do x period and there is a professor who spends all there time researching x, then say it. That might help. What I've been told is that it really only takes one person on the committee to get you in. If one person likes your application and thinks you have potential, they will go to bat for you and will probably help convince others.

In my own SOP, I went the "I like these sub-fields and these topics in those fields with this topic being at the top of my list" approach. This worked well I think in my SOP since I went from describing my previous work in my area of most interest to putting it into context of what I like in general and how it fits with my future research goals and what I want to get out of that research. If you would like, I don't mind PMing you with the SOP that I used. Its not perfect and there are parts (e.g. the intro) which I think could be better as I think it seems a bit cheesy -- but it worked though.

[kalai_nalla]

Okay That is really nice of you ! I got an idea of what an SOP needs to do :) I would to love to read your SOP if you dont mind !

I have started on my SOP Wish me good luck

[Adamah]

nvseal, did you apply to the MIT PhD program? From what I understand they don't have separate Master's admissions.