u/TheSoulReaper2004

• College: BE CS at BITSP
• GPA: 9.3/10
• GRE: On Friday (whats a good enough score ? 330+ ?)
• IELTS: TBD
• Work Exp: SWE 1YOE as FTE + 6M Intern at famous US Fintech company, working on production LLM agent stuff and generic distributed systems/backend stuff for a product. Summer Intern at a Quant Trading Fund
• Publications:
  • 1 AAAI (special track, not to dox) - 2nd author
  • 3 Neurips/ICLR/ICML Workshop papers - First author on all
• Research:
  • 1.) Summer Intern in ML at famous Indian Lab (very well ranked on csrankings in India, AAAI paper at this lab).
  • 2.) Multiple small semester-long research projects
  • 3.) Last semester research with a prof that resulted in a neurips workshop paper
  • 4. Research fellow at semi-famous AI Safety program SPAR (part-time, online)
• LORs: 1 from work (Staff eng in my team) + 2 Academic (Indian Lab professor, CSE Prof from university with ws paper)
• TA exp: TAed for 2 semesters, one for DL and one for an intro to cs course
• Interests: Will align SOP along AI safety and interpretability research, will like to pursue this direction further in the program

Tentative programs list (need to trim/personalize):

• Stanford ? (moonshot, unlikely considering cgpa)
• CMU MSML
• CMU MS CS
• CMU LTI ? (unsure if I am competitive for this as I dont necessarily have a lot of NLP research, mostly just LLM and interp adjacent stuff that is the closest)
• UIUC MS CS
• Georgia Tech MS CS
• UT Austin MS CS
• UCSD MS CSE
• Michigan MSE CSE
• UCLA MS CS

Things i am confused about

• Columbia MS CS
• NYU Courant MS CS (Thesis) - Want to know if this is competitive and has good outcomes, havent heard about it much
• UWM MSCS (Thesis)
• UMD MSCS

Targeting more research focused programs, hence having a thesis component would be a filter. Would eventually aim to do impactful and publishable research at uni and work in the industry after.

For the uni list, i feel its too long right now, what can i trim ? Also any other programs I am missing that are strong research/thesis focused ?