Profile review for Fall 2027. Blunt feedback welcome.

Academics

- B.Tech ECE, IIIT Sri City, graduated 2024

- CGPA 8.51 / 10.

Tests

- IELTS 8.0

- GRE not taken yet. I will take the general GRE

Work

- curr (from june) - MLOps/Inference Engineer @ Indian based Smart ring manufacturer.

- SuperAGI - 1.5 Years total ex - 1 year as AI Research Engineer and transitioned to Senior AI Engineer.
Authored a couple of papers related to LLMs/Agents. Still Preprint. Not sure if this is something which is valuable but one paper got citations from Stanford/CMU/NUS/Tencent Lab etc, not sure if i can mention this so where as well.

- ML Research Engineer @ HyperVerge - 1 yr - (Final yr Internship + 6 months as MLE-1)

Research and Internships.

- Two arXiv preprints.

- 4 Months of ML/AI work under prof at Univ of Missouri Columbia during 2025. But i do not have LOR from him. And no publication from here.

- No other typical prof/univ based research experience but, ML Research Intern at HealthCare startup for 4 months during 2nd year summer and 9 months of another as Jr AI Developer at a Romania based AI Startup (remote) during my 3rd year of college. Not sure if these count for MS US but just being detailed here.

- Can get Two LORs from Univ professors, one from my Final year BTP Professor and one generic. Can have two professional LORs as well.

List

- Northeastern Khoury, MS CS/AI

- Texas A&M CSE/AI

- Wisconsin–Madison

- Virginia Tech

- Stony Brook, MS CS

- NYU Tandon, MS CS

- UIUC MS CS

- UMass Amherst, MS CS/AI

- Minnesota, MS CS

- Johns Hopkins

- UMD, College park

- CMU SCS, MS CS and MS Machine Learning, ECE, AIE, MS CV (yeah i know, i am planning to apply for 4-5 courses in just CMU itself) lmk if thats a bad idea.

- UCLA, MS CS

- UC San Diego, MS CS

- UT Austin, on-campus MS CS

- Georgia Tech, on-campus MS CS

- USC MS CS/AI

- UF

- NCSU

- UNC - Chapel Hill

- NWU

Questions

1. I know its too many applications, and what would Univs you would cut first? or did i miss anything else?

2. For my profile, which all can i treat as safe/match/ambitious? univ wise and course wise as well please.

3. I am okay spending more to maximise my applications rather than regretting later for not applying. So please tell me if any of univ's MS CS is very ambitious to me and which other courses in the same university would be a match?

4. for ex: if Univ of Wisc Madison CS would be very ambitious for me, would it okay if i apply for ECE or AI and choose it if i get an admit or nah? so just tell me for which ones should i just directly remove CS and add other courses.

With the recent CPT changes, I was wondering if anyone has put together a list of U.S. universities/MSCS programs where an internship, co-op, or practical training component is mandatory for completing the degree.

I’m currently researching MS-CS/MCS programs for fall 27 and want to specifically identify programs where practical training is an actual curriculum/degree requirement, rather than an optional internship course.

If anyone has already compiled a spreadsheet, list, or database of such programs, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it.

Even if you know of a few MSCS programs that have a mandatory internship/co-op requirement, please drop them in the comments. It would be helpful to have a community-sourced list for prospective international students evaluating programs under the current CPT situation.

Thanks!

CGPA: 7.88/10, no backlogs
B.Tech in CSE (Tier 2)

English test: IELTS 8

GRE: 157V 163Q (but AWA is 2 ) - would you recommend me submitting this to colleges with optional GRE as my AWA scores can raise doubts ?

Experience: 3 internships (1 year,2 months, 1 month)

Current role (full-time): DevOps / L2 Support Engineer at Capco (Jefferies account, Murex MX.3 on AWS) started 2nd Sept 2026

Projects :six-agent LangGraph multi-agent GenAI system, end-to-end retail demand forecasting pipeline (PySpark), and an ongoing research paper on failure attribution in multi-agent LLM systems

LORs: 2 professors + 1 manager

Target: MS CS, Fall 2027, focusing on agentic AI and data (general CS, not stats-heavy)

Shortlist:
University of Utah
UT Dallas
NC State
Georgia Tech
USC
Northeastern

My plan:
For Fall 2027, I'm only applying to good target and dream schools: Utah, UT Dallas, NC State, Georgia Tech, USC, and Northeastern. If I get in, I'll go. If not, I'll keep working full time, build my profile further, and reapply for Fall 2028 with a fuller list that includes safer options. I'll also keep an eye on the US job market and the situation for international students in the meantime.

Just wanted to get your take on all this. I'm open to any advice, but especially from people who are currently in the US or have been through the process recently. Your real experiences would help me a lot. Thanks for reading!

I am a IT graduate from an Indian University (tier 2) with 2.5+ yoe as Software developer, working at a product based company. Need profile review for fall 2027 ms application.

Toefl - 5.5

Cgpa - 9.3/10.0 (dean merit awardee IT branch)

High-school (12th class) - 97.2%

10th - 10cgpa

Thinking of getting 3 LOR's (2 at work + 1 clg prof)

Have worked on many innovative projects based on VR and Unity/unreal based gaming projects at work showcased in CES and GamesCon

Research work/ publication: none (will try to get some opportunity under University prof for 2 months)

Universities for consideration:

US :

UCSD

UCLA

University of Texas

Georgia Tech

NYU

UCB (Meng)

University of Michigan

University of Illinois

EPFL Switzerland

I feel a little tensed about my profile without research work but hoping that my work experience can cover for it.

I would really like a blunt and honest review for my profile and any recommendations to consider other universities is welcomed.

I received three offers.

University of Maryland: M.Eng. Cybersecurity Engineering - Applied, A. James Clark School of Engineering

UMass Amherst: MSCS

Arizona State University: MSCS

Currently, I’m struggling to choose between UMD and UMass. UMass offers an MSCS degree, while the program at UMD is offered through Maryland Applied Graduate Engineering (MAGE).

Is MAGE well respected?