Profile Evaluation

[csaspirant13]

Hi All

I want general advice from people about my future prospects for Grad School. I want to pursue my masters in Computer Science from the Fall 0f 2013. After my masters, I want to get work experience ( or get a job first and then masters, however that may pan out ), and eventually apply for an MBA in Finance.

Coming back to the situation at hand, I want critiques on how my existing profile looks for admission into Grad Schools. I'll be a senior in Fall 2012 and am doing my bachelor's from a private tech school in Chicago, IL. My GPA is a 3.0, which I admit is not so stellar. Although I have been a MATH tutor on campus, I don't know if that cuts it. I also have work experience from this summer. My internship is currently in progress in downtown chicago.

As far as research goes, I don't have any. Although I am looking to start some independent research with an Artificial Intelligence Professor from the fall semester. This also brings me to the point of mentioning, that the schools I would want to apply into are the ones with deadlines around mid-end December 2012 till Feb-March 2013. I am preparing for the GRE as well and plan to write it sometime around October.

In the meantime, I'll be working on couple of independent projects on development on CentOS. I think it might an edge to my admissions profile. As for my recommendations, I have four choices-

1) My supervisor at my internship

2) My math professor who also knows me well and that I am Math tutor

3) My supervisor from On-Campus tutoring job.

4) A professor from my CS dept, whom I am trying to get to know better (the AI professor with whom I want to do research and will also take a class with him)..

Given that my GRE and recommendations come off well, and I land the research, how do my prospects look for a good comp. sci MS program? It would be nice if I could also get a few suggestions, about schools that I should apply into.. I plan to apply to around 8-9 schools from the following-

1) UC - Santa barbara

2) UC - Santa Cruz ....... the deadlines for the UCs are not in the optimum range.

3) University of Colorado - Denver

4) University of Colorado - Colorado Springs

5) University of Florida

6) University of Maryland - College Park

7) UMass - Amherst

8) UMinn - Twin Cities

9) Rutgers

10) Polytechnic Institute of NYU

11) Stony Brook - SUNY

12) UNC - Chapel Hill

13) UNC - Charolette

14) Ohio State University

Please feel free to suggest some schools not in the list that I should also look into..

Thank you so much.