u/Pale_Top2519

I’m an out of state UW engineering student paying around $60k/year to attend, and I just got my placement result. ECE was the major I came here for and the field I’ve had my sights set on basically the entire time, but I didn’t get it. I got placed into Materials Science instead, which was an alternate choice and a major I genuinely have little to no interest in pursuing.

I feel like I seriously screwed up my first year. My UW GPA is around a 2.8, so I understand that probably hurt me badly in placement. What scares me is that one bad year now potentially determines what I study for the next three years, even though I’m almost certain I want my career to be somewhere within ECE(computer architecture, VLSI, hardware, electronics, etc)

The financial part makes this even harder. My family is spending a huge amount for me to attend UW from out of state, including tuition, housing, flights, everything. Spending $60k/year made sense to me when I thought I would be studying ECE. Spending that much to complete a degree I have almost no interest in makes much less sense.

I could potentially transfer back to an in state school for dramatically less money. I’m wondering whether I should try using that record plus my UW coursework to transfer into EE/ECE somewhere else, potentially back in my state.

I know I can apply to UW ECE again through the capacity-constrained application next spring, but with a 2.8 GPA I honestly don’t know how realistic that is even if I improve significantly this upcomnig year.

Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Missed your intended major, got placed into something you didn’t want, and either successfully switched later or transferred out?

Is there any realistic pathway where I can stay at UW and still end up in ECE, or would transferring to a cheaper school where I can actually study EE/ECE be the smarter move?

I’m not interested in transferring to UW Bothell just for the UW name. If I’m going to leave Seattle, I’d rather go back to my state, pay substantially less, and study something I actually want.

I’m genuinely pretty devastated right now and don’t know what the best move is.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has gone through something similar or knows how realistic an ECE switch/transfer would be from here.

I’m kind of curious about how much the actual venue you publish in matters long term.

Obviously I understand that publishing research is important, and I know that getting into a top venue is supposed to be a pretty big accomplishment.

For example, in CS/ML you have places like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc. (I know those are conferences rather than journals), and other fields obviously have their own top journals/conferences.

But is there actually something significantly different about having a paper at one of these top venues compared to publishing similar work at a lesser known but still legitimate venue?

I understand that for grad school it probably helps because it shows that your research went through a very selective review process and makes you stand out compared to other applicants. But does the name of the venue continue to matter after that???

For example, if someone wanted to work somewhere extremely competitive like a frontier AI lab, research lab, quant firm, etc., would having first-author NeurIPS/ICML-level publications noticeably increase their chances of getting interviews or hired?

Or at that point do people mostly care about the actual quality of the research and what you personally contributed?

And I’m not asking only about CS. I’m curious if this is similar in EE, physics, biology, medicine, mechanical engineering, etc. Does publishing in the “top” journals/conferences in your field actually have a meaningful career impact, or is most of the benefit basically prestige/signaling for academia and grad school?

Basically, how much does venue prestige actually matter, and at what point in your career does it stop mattering?

I’m pretty new to local LLMs and I’m trying to figure out the best open weight model I can run for machine learning coding. I currently have access to 8× Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs with 24 GB VRAM each, so 192 GB total VRAM, through a compute cluster.

Right now I’m running Qwen3-Coder-Next Q5, and it is fast and works pretty well, but I’m not sure whether it is the best model I can realistically run on this hardware. My main use case is heavy ML work: understanding ML theory, reading large repositories, designing experiments, implementing models from papers, debugging training pipelines, checking validation leakage, submitting cluster jobs, monitoring results, and iterating autonomously.

I’m looking for something that can get as close as reasonably possible to current frontier models for machine learning and coding. I know an open model running locally probably will not fully match the strongest Claude, Codex, or GPT models, but I want the strongest practical option without making it unbearably slow.

I’m considering models such as MiniMax M2.7, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and other recent coding or reasoning models, but I’m unsure what will actually fit, what quantization would be worth using?

I’m trying to reduce my dependence on proprietary subscriptions and usage limits. Since I already have access to the hardware, I would rather run a strong open weight model continuously instead of paying for multiple subscriptions and constantly running out of limits.

What model would you recommend for this setup? Is Qwen3-Coder-Next already the best balance of coding quality and speed, or is there a noticeably stronger model that can fit within 192 GB VRAM and still be usable interactively?

Hey everyone,

So I’m a freshman at UW right now, and I came here from pretty far away, basically all the way from the East Coast. I’m currently in ENGRUD, and my GPA right now is around a 2.7, which I know is honestly really low, especially for engineering placement.

Finals are coming up, and I’ve been studying really hard this quarter. But the thing is, no matter how much I study, I feel like I keep getting the same kind of grades anyway, maybe slightly higher but still in the same ball park. It honestly breaks my heart because I feel like I’m putting in the effort, but the results are not showing up at all.

At this point, I don’t even know if college is for me. I know GPA is something I can maybe recover over the next couple years, but my biggest concern right now is placement. My first choice is EE, and I’m really worried I won’t get into it because of my current GPA.

I’ve talked to advisors, and they give good general advice, but it’s not really the kind of study advice or actual direction that helps me fix the problem, if that makes sense. I just feel really screwed, and I honestly don’t know what to do.

It feels like there’s nothing I can do at this point, especially with finals and placement coming up VERY soon. If anyone has been in a similar situation, got into EE with a lower GPA, recovered from a bad freshman year, or just has any advice, I would really appreciate it. Please help. Thanks.

For anyone who’s taken Marzban’s Stats 390, I understand the grading can vary from quarter to quarter, but what are the general final grade thresholds? Roughly what overall percentage or performance level corresponds to a 4.0, 3.9, 3.8, etc.? Is it usually based on fixed cutoffs, a curve, or relative ranking in the class? Any approximate ranges or past experiences would be really helpful.