Non CS Undergrad Looking to Switch to CS for PhD

[ralphyralph]

Hi Guys!

 

I'm looking to get a Ph.D. from a good (Top 10 would be nice) graduate school. I went to a solid state school (think UVA, UT-Austin, etc.) and double majored in mathematics and systems engineering. I'm graduating this year summa cum laude with a 3.95 GPA and 170(Q)/167(V) on the GRE.

 

Because of my super busy schedule as a double major, I really didn't have time to make many computer science courses outside of one graduate computer vision class. However, I've had several research projects relating to parallel computing, computer vision/graphics and computational optimization.

 

I've got one first author paper published at a very good IEEE conference, a poster at SIGGRAPH, one in review publication for a good parallel computing journal (also first author), and my senior thesis heavily involved GPGPU computing and led to me publishing some software that is pretty popular with researchers in the medical imaging field. At this point, I'm very proficient in several important languages (C++, Python, Java...) and have a good understanding of the fundamentals of computer science (I like to read about these things alot!)

 

I'd really love to get into computational engineering, computer vision/graphics, or parallel computing at the grad level and have fallen in love with Stanford's ICME PhD, the interdisciplinary SEAS PhD at Harvard, and several other programs (too many to list!). However, I fear that my lack of traditional CS classes (Algorithms, Data Structure, OO Programmming, etc.) will really kill me at some of these schools, despite the fact that I'm really interested, and pretty decent at most of this stuff (hopefully as evidenced by my research projects).

 

There isn't a CS gre anymore...grrr...so what should I do to mitigate my lack of a traditional CS background? I'd really rather not do a masters first...any suggestions! I really appreciate the feedback

[dat_nerd]

Your background is certainly competitive, but many top programs do require that you have taken a certain list of prerequisite courses. Once you have taken those courses, I think you'd be a very strong applicant, even without a CS degree. Can you take the prerequisite courses (operating systems, theory, etc) as a non-degree seeking student at your current university?