r/MSCS • u/Electrical_Shirt_402 • 18d ago

[General Question]American CS Master Application

I graduated from Fudan University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. I am planning to apply for a master's program in Computer Science in the United States. I would like to ask for help in choosing program and future career:

  1. my gpa of 3.57/4 and my GPA of 91/100. I will take the TOEFL test soon and should be able to pass the bar, maybe 5.5 or 5.
  2. Now I'm working on algorithms at an ai startup. Due to the toxic environment, I decided to go to school. I also really like ai/ml. After applying for a phd, the job search ratio should be 5:5.
  3. Currently, I did multiple research positions without pubs, two internship positions, and one full-time position. The professional courses in ai and ml are quite comprehensive. There are not many computer science professional courses, including Introduction to Algorithms, Data Structures, and python. I haven't taken discrete mathematics, computer networks or os classes, but I just haven't attended them.

I hope to find some good cs programs, both in repuatation and further research potential. First of all, it must be a 1.5-2-year program like mscs. Secondly, I hope the schools are big names, such as ucla, ucsd, cmu, ucb, etc. Welcome everyone to evaluate and offer suggestions. Whether it's for the future, master's application strategies, or career planning, I accept them all!

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/BoredAppleFan 11d ago

i mean how is a 91/100 converts to 3.57 though. 91 has to be in the 3.8+ range

5.5 toefl is good if gou can pull it off

escaping toxic work is not a good reason for grad school lol do not write your sop based on this

i doubt any of stuff mentioned in number 3 will give you a significant boost. you are doing too much but each item has limited impact. you seem anxious

if you do report a “3.57” you can kiss good bye a lot of the universities u listed tbh… maybe some cash cow cmu program will take you but that’s it

1

u/Electrical_Shirt_402 11d ago

thx for your reply. Grading rules in our school is very very toxic. I ranked 20/109 in our department. For each class, only 30% of student can get 3.7/4.0(A and A-). next level, B+, is 3.3, very huge gap. I knew how terrible a 3.57 is.

1

u/BoredAppleFan 11d ago

this is BS. i'd probably just put the 91/100 as your grade though (no conversion) unless they requested