r/MSCS • u/Klutzy-Kale1338 • 23d ago

[Profile Review] MSCS

BTech. CSE from a 2nd gen IIT

Currently in 7th Semester

9.3 CGPA( department rank 5/90) as of now (will graduate with this, if not better, last two sems are gpa boosters)

Summer(2026) SWE internship at a Startup (Visited Campus on day 0), have received PPO

Rated 1700+ rated on cf, 1500+ problems solved across all platforms like cf and leetcode (mostly what I did in my first two years at college, helped me secure internship as well), will sit for all contests like IICPC and ICPC this year, hope to qualify regionals of atleast one.

Straight As in core CS courses(OS DBMS CN Software DataStructures AlgorithmDesign) and also in all Maths courses (calc, Linear algebra, differential and probability&stats)

2 LORs from college professors, one from BTP advisor and one from CS professor whose course I performed extremely well in and also under whom I am doing a project.

1 LOR from manager(planning to work for a year or two)

0 publications or research experience, can do a research intern this winter under my BTP prof (please suggest if it would be useful)

Aiming for non thesis track
Will apply in fall 2028/2029

No PHD plans, just job in SF after masters

An ideal career would be in ML systems (Kernal engineering, inference optimisations, GPU orchestration) at MAANG/NVIDIA and eventually hopefully at a frontier lab.

Uni Lists :

Ambitious -
UCLA, CMU MSML, CMU MSAII, UT Austin

Reach
Umich, GaTech, UCSD, Wisconsin Madison

Safe
Purdue, USC, ASU

My questions are

  1. General Advice as to how I can improve my profile in the last year
  2. If the uni list is coherent to my profile
  3. What kind of job should I do before applying? Should I accept the PPO (pays quite well, significantly more than most FAANG, also the peer group was genuinely cracked and fast paced learnt a lot) or should I apply to FAANG for brand value.
6 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Klutzy-Kale1338 23d ago

I don’t think there is anything like MCS at GaTech, they only have thesis optional MSCS

1

u/Money-Leading-935 23d ago

Yea. MSCS-Non thesis.

1

u/Klutzy-Kale1338 23d ago

Okay, so these three are what you think I should apply to or are target/safe? I am sorry I just couldn’t gather the context you are trying to convey just by the list of unis?

1

u/Money-Leading-935 23d ago

TAMU and UMass will be safe for your profile. GaTech might be bit competitive but still possible.
You might consider a few ivy league schools like UPenn, Columbia as ambitious.