Advise for Finnish undergrad student wanting to do masters in US

[Samppaa]

Hey. I am currently studying Computer Science at undergrad level here in Finland and I will graduate approximately in ~1 year. Some people from the Fulbright program spoke at my department and it really caught my interest. They offer some stipends yearly for people to go US and do masters/phd. The amount is 30-50k USD and it's possible to apply for renewal stipend next year. The Finnish government will also pay student support money for me. I've also been studying Chinese at the same time at my university's Confucius Institute. My teacher urged me to apply for a year long exchange study program to either mainland China or Taiwan(Peking University or National Taiwan University) to better learn the language and actually bring it to conversational level. The problem is that this would actually lengthen my graduation by a year. How would this be viewed in potential grad schools? Would it affect my chances negatively if I spend 1 year learning the language instead of my major? I still feel that going abroad for some time is the only way I can get my Chinese to good level, there is only so much a class room alone can do. Basically the whole exchange study period would be fully funded by my university and I would even get money for the flight tickets and other stuff that I need.

 

I've looked at some US grad schools and some of them look at your GPA of the last 1-2 years, so would they then look at my GPA from the exchange study period or just focus on the CS courses? It feels strange that they would look at the language courses then if I am applying to CS grad program.

 

My overall GPA is currently around 4.0/5 on the 1-5 scale that is used here, and major GPA is around 4.5/5. Basically every CS course is 5, but one is 3 and one 2(going to retake this in the summer as it was quite a basic course but my state of mind wasn't the best at the moment). The university I am studying in hovers around 70 in the world rankings on almost every list(ARWU, QS, etc) I've been looking mainly at the top 100 schools with good CS programs. It also seems that the programs vary much more from each other in US that they do in EU, there are both taught masters degrees and research masters degrees while at least in Finland most of the masters degrees are taught with research portion where you write your graduate thesis. Here only at the phd stage you start to do full research. Also here probably around 95% of the students that complete undergraduate degree will also complete masters degree, it's like the standard here and also in many other European countries. I am not really looking for research masters program as I am not sure whether I want to continue to phd or not. It's pretty hard to weed out the good programs when the amount of schools is so high. I would be thankful if some people recommended good programs they know, I am mainly interested in software engineering. 

 

I noticed that almost every school in the US wants the GRE test scores too. I hadn't heard about that too as it isn't really used in Europe so I had to check it out. The math part didn't seem too hard with some training for the time limit, but the reading comprehension felt the hardest for me so I guess I should start training for that early enough.

 

I checked some Canadian programs out too, and the one at UBC looked pretty good + the tuition was on level that I could even pay it without any financial assistance.

 

So the main question is that should I go to the student exchange for a year, would it negatively affect my chances of admission if have studied something else but my major for a year? Also could you recommend some good CS programs that are mainly taught based but contain a research portion like a thesis. The Fulbright people told that I should apply to a lot of schools so the chances are obviously better. I don't think aiming for the top 20 is necessarily realist, so I will aim for the top 100 probably and apply to a good amount of schools when the time comes. How cutthroat are US schools generally, I've read a lot of pulling all-nighters and stressing enormously about the grades, but during my time of studying here in my country I've never really pulled any all-nighters or stressed tremendously(always have little stress though). I do the assignments, split the workload and read for the test, that's about it. Having read about the grad school in US, I've gotten a pretty crude image. Is it really that bad?

Edited May 14, 2015 by Samppaa

[xolo]

I don't think knowing, or not knowing, Chinese has impact on Computer Science applications. Nor does being 1 year older, or younger, at time of application. So do what you want to do. Why not apply both years for CS? The first year, even if you receive rejects, will be enlightening and you will learn the process and have a lot more material for the second go. Who knows, you might get accepted.