Profile Evaluation - FALL 16 | MS in CS

[yathshar19]

I request you to kindly evaluate my profile and rate/suggest me some universities.

GRE Score - 325
v -159
q -166
awa -3 (screwed it up. will try to compensate in toefl)

Toefl -Yet to give

Interested field - MS in CS / data analytics/ML 

UG: 
College: Jaypee Institute of Information Technology ,JIIT Noida 
University : JIITU 
Final Overall Percentage : 8.2/10 (in top 10) 

Work Experience: 
- Working as an Research Associate at IIITD under a prof. who did his MS/PHD from CMU.(FEB 2015 - present) 
a One Govt Funded Project (Big data/data analytics)

b Assisting a PHD student with her research. (Big data /data analytics)
c Just got an opportunity to work with a prof from ASU (Will write in SOP but don't have much time for the LOR)

- Worked at Infosys Ltd as a software engineer (MAY 2013-JAN 2015) 
- Working on Big data technology - Apache storm (2 big projects)
- Worked on RoR,Python,C/C++,Java,SAP-abap 

Internship: 

(Nothing Major)
- Indian Oil corporation - Worked on their repository management system. 


Academic Projects: 
- Major Project - Object and video recognition using Deep Belief Neural Network (ML project). Secured highest grade in the both term evaluations)
- Analysis of Parallel preformance of Message Passing Interface(MPI) Sorting Algorithms for Distributive Computing and Simulation of a Scheduler using MPI in GNU-C++ 
- Many other mini projects

Other Independent project - 

- Co-founder Charityhub.in - Online market place for donations and charities. (currently in initial phase, website is finished and deployed but recruiting volunteers)  

LORs - 
1) Prof under which I am working as an RA (MS/PHD from CMU) - Strong 
2) Research scientist under a Gatech prof - moderate
3) Prof. JIIT or Infosys manager - moderate

Publications: 
No papers Published 


Achievements: 
- Successfully created an under water maneuvering ROBOT (Secured 2nd position at IIT Kharagpur) 


university shorlisted (will apply to around 12-15 )

 

I request you to suggest me some universities where I have a realistic chance

 

[ ] Cmu  - Prof from CMU

[ ] Gatech - dream university

[ ] Columbia - A friend of mine got in with a similar profile

[ ] Ucsd - A friend of mine got in with a similar profile + good cs university
[ ] Ucsb - good for CS +  A prof is really close to my Prof from CMU (He states on quara that he prefers students from my prof)

[ ] Umcp - not clearing GPA criteria of 3.5

[ ] Umin twin cities -  Ms in Data analytics (not clearing MS in CS gpa criteria of 3.5)

[ ] UNC chapel hill - AWA requirement too high

 

[ ] USC
[ ] NCSU
[ ] NEU
[ ] Ohio
[ ] ASU
[ ] Stony brook

[ ] Northwestern
[ ] Uci
[ ] Mich state
[ ] Penn state
[ ] Tamu
[ ] Rutgers
[ ] Nyu

[ace589]

Northwestern is probably the best for analytics.  They have a really good reputation within the INFORMs community.  Northwestern is mostly about the traditional analytics using OR/applied math.   Michigan State is more broad and includes more business analysis and IT side of analytics.  MSU is a really nice campus with a large population of international communities.

I would apply to both of these if analytics is your interest.

[yathshar19]

Thanks for your reply. 

I have one big doubt - There are some universities with MS in Data Science course. Is applying to a particular course a good idea or shall I apply for MS in CS as general? Are these 2 courses same for the recruiters or MS in CS given more preference than MS in Data science?

How will you rate these universities in terms of Computer science and data science?

[ace589]

Analytics may make it more difficult to get jobs outside of analytics. And it may be more difficult if you decide to go for a Phd.  But Northwestern and MSU are top programs in Analytics. 

Theoretic CS programs will probably not include analytics and are more about theory of computation, design of programming languages, and such.  But applied computer science and software engineering type programs may offer courses in big data, natural language processing, simulation, HPC, distributed processing, algorithms, etc.  CMU has a top software engineering program but it may lack these types of courses as it is mostly about building professional skills. I do not know much about the other schools programs.

  Employers typically hire data engineers and sometimes data scientists with a CS type background.

You have to choose the right path based on whether you are most interested in the business, the technology, or the science.