Interested in advice/stats for application preparation...

[josh-cs]

Hi everyone. This is my first post but I've been a regular reader of this board for several months now. I'm trying to get a better idea about how competitive top CS grad schools are to get into. The reason is that I'm a senior in CS/Applied math from a relatively small state school (10k students) with a small CS program. Research is encouraged but hasn't really been emphasized like I'm sure it is at bigger/research universities. This is a teaching school so unless I want to volunteer as an RA next summer or get an internship/coop elsewhere, any research I get will mostly be what I think of on my own (and I've tried for months, I have no idea where to even start).

I graduate in December 2010, so I won't be enrolling till Fall 2011, but I want to prepare as best as I can now. I have a 3.91 GPA (4.0 in Math, ~3.8 in CS). I'm confident I'll get strong LoR's from extremely good professors who got PhD's from good research schools (U.Wisconsin being the best). I've also received two small but competitive CS/math scholarships. One which is only given to one out of probably 100 CS students at my school per year based on merit/performance/recommendations. I haven't taken the GRE yet but I think I'll be well prepared when I take it.

One of my professors has told me he thought I could get into one of my top CS schools (UNC or Duke), but I'm a little more pessimistic, especially after reading this forum and seeing all the rejections for what appears to be strong applicants. And I'm also afraid being from a lesser-known college is going to hurt me quite a bit since grad schools are so competitive. Anyway, I'd be very interested in what advice guys may have and to also hear undergrad stats and what schools you got accepted and rejected to and if you got funding (TA or RA?).

Thanks in advance, and I look forward to hearing what you guys have to say!

P.S. Most of my top schools are in the top 20, but not the top 4 since I know I won't have a chance in hell to get in there unless I get a real lucky research opportunity.

P.P.S. I'm leaning towards just a M.S., but going after a PhD is not out of the question.