r/MSCS

Hi everyone,

I’m currently at a crossroads and could really use some unfiltered perspective from this community. I have 4 years of experience as a software engineer in India, working across both the banking and payment domains. I have recently been admitted into UCSD for the MSCSE program.

However, the "glamour" of a US degree is quickly being eclipsed by the cold reality of the current landscape. I’m hoping those of you currently in the US (or who recently graduated) can help me make this decision.

My biggest concerns are:

• The Job Market: I know 2026 isn't 2021. While AI/ML roles are seeing demand, the "generalist" software engineering market feels incredibly volatile. Is a top-tier degree like UCSD actually helping people land interviews in this climate, or is the degree-to-job conversion rate as low as I fear?
• The "Duration of Status" Change: I’ve been reading up on the DHS proposal to replace "Duration of Status" with a fixed, four-year admission period. The uncertainty of having to file for a USCIS Extension of Stay (with potential for denial/biometrics fees) feels like an added layer of stress that wasn't there before. How much is this actually impacting student peace of mind on the ground? Also, the grace period reducing from 60 days to 30 days.
• Financial Exposure: Taking out a massive loan for a US Master's feels like a "bet the farm" scenario. If I don't land a high-paying role within a few months of graduation, the debt servicing would be catastrophic back home.

My specific questions:

1. Fixed Admission Reality: For those already in the US, how are you preparing for the transition away from "Duration of Status"? Is the prospect of filing for extensions and paying extra fees creating a "permanent anxiety" for international students? (While I know it is not published yet, will the regulators mitigate parts of it in the final review OR Am I just worrying about the impact a little too much)
2. H-1B Math: Given the new wage-weighted lottery, is it realistic to expect an H-1B path as a student, or is the US now effectively a "degree-only" destination where staying long-term is a statistical long shot? OR is this favoring international students?
3. Is studying at UCSD worth the risk considering the current landscape?

Hi everyone, looking for some insights on the current situation that would help me understand where things stand right now.

A bit about me: I have 10+ years of SDE experience at one of the top MNCs in India, working on the latest tech stacks. I'm planning to pursue a Master's in the US and trying to decide which program would be the most beneficial for me: Computer Science or an AI-related program.

Please help me with this as I want to understand the current state before deciding.

My main question: Are people with similar profiles: 5+ years (or more) of prior India experience, actually getting callbacks, OAs, or internship offers right now? How is the overall job scene for experienced folks doing an MS in the US?

Any honest, recent input from people who've been through this or are currently going through it would be hugely appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to apply for MS CS programs for Fall 2027 and wanted some honest feedback on my overall profile strength.

• BE comp eng at tier 3 college
• 8.53/10 cgpa
• gre: yet to appear (targeting 165Q+, 330 overall)
• toefl: yet to appear (expecting over 110)
• Internship: Data Engineering + LLM/RAG pipelines (6 months) and Data Analyst (3+3 months beginning June 2026)
• tech club lead (2yrs) lots of impact and work done for the community
• research: completing first paper this semester (Sem 7)
• publications: none

My Current Shortlist:

Dream CMU MS CS, Georgia Tech MS CS

Target UIUC MCS, UCSD, UMich, UT Austin, Purdue, UMaryland

Safe USC, Northeastern, ASU, UMass Amherst

My Specific Questions:

• Is my shortlist realistic given a non-IIT background with 8.53 CGPA and no research?
• Are there any target-tier schools I'm missing that are good for industry placement and accessible without research?
• Does tech club work carry any real weight in MS CS applications or is it largely ignored?

also if im going the wrong direction, if there are things i need to reconsider, please lemme know. thanks <33

EDIT: as a follow up, wanted to ask if there are other courses in these tier 1/2 unis which are worth doing (an mscs extension basically)
however ive read alot about cmu's courses and how they are oversaturated, so not sure how wise this is as well

I just got my admission decision a couple of hours ago, but when I tried to submit my decision, the portal says the deadline was May 18, 2026 and won’t let me submit anything. It only shows “deadline has passed.”

Anyone else run into this? What should I do?

Hey guys!

I’ve narrowed down my admits to just Rice MCS as the other schools I got admitted to did not seem like the best fit or were generally considered a worse option.

However, now I want to compare this choice with one of just staying here in India where I work as an SDE.

My profile:
3 years of workex here in India, earning a decent-ish amount (25LPA)

But there is a career gap of about one year, because of health stuff in my family, and I started working at my new job a year or so ago.

So, I figured a good way to get a sort of fresh start and also jump up career wise (if I get a job in the US) is a masters degree.

The MCS is a 1.5 year degree and 3 month internships are a requirement of the course. From my understanding, most students get internships at great places to work and places doing stuff I’d love to do - SysML and distributed systems.

Given the scholarship, the tuition comes down to somewhat reasonable I feel, I would need to take a loan for about half this amount with my savings.

Do you think it’s worth it to do this given the way the job market and immigration policy is in our dystopia today? 🥲

Thanks for reading!

Got rejected an hour ago.

So I'm planning to take the GRE at home and targeting somewhere around 315-320. Been going through each university's website trying to figure out if the home edition is accepted and honestly it's been a headache.

The only ones I've confirmed so far that DON'T accept it are CMU and ASU. For the rest, the websites either don't mention it at all or are super vague about it.

Here's my list split by tier (MS Non thesis CSE programs ~ dont want to do research work):

Reach

- CMU

- Georgia Tech

- UCLA

- Northwestern

- UC San Diego

- UIUC

Target

- Purdue

- Texas A&M

- University of Maryland

- NYU Tandon

- Boston University

- NCSU

- CU Boulder

Safe

- UT Dallas

- ASU

- University at Buffalo

- University of Florida

- Penn State

- San Jose State

Has anyone here submitted GRE home scores to any of these schools? Especially curious about Georgia Tech, Purdue, NCSU and UIUC since they seem to require the GRE but don't say anything about the home version.

Also if you know of any other schools that secretly don't accept home edition scores, please let me know. Don't want to find out after submitting!

Thanks for reading and replying :)

I’m gonna be starting at Bloomberg FT soon in NYC and I want to do a part time MS while I work. The school I went to for undergrad wasn’t too good so I want a better signal on my resume to help me better recruit for more interesting roles in robotics/AV companies (Waymo, Tesla AP/Optimus, Nuro, etc) and maybe quant dev. I majored in Computer Engineering in undergrad and I enjoy C++ and low level systems programming so I probably want to stay in that area.

**GT OMSCS**
**Pros:**
* Good robotics courses
* Better CS ranking
* Is free with BB tuition reimbursement

**Cons:**
* OMSCS is very popular and lots of ppl have a MSCS from GT so I don’t think it’s a great resume boost
* Fully online, might be hard to do robotics research for class credit since it’s all remote

**Columbia MSCS**
**Pros:**
* Is in person, so I can potentially do research in robotics labs for class credit
* Has Ivy League prestige so it could be a good signal for my goals

**Cons:**
* Courses are likely not as good as the GT ones
* Isn’t as known for CS and robotics as GT is
* Will cost around 40k total, but tbh over the 3-4 years the degree will take I don’t really care about the cost
* I know that ppl consider this program a cash cow by the uni, but not really sure if that matters to recruiters at all

Anyone still not hear back and have the current status bar still? Also did anyone who apply to the PhD then MS get accepted yet?

Update (24 hours later): My MSCS status disappeared, but my MSAI status is still there (what are the odds after months of waiting). No decision yet on both

I have an admit from umich and waitlist from UCLA and upenn. Given the high tuition fees (32k Per semester) at Umich as an international student I am really doubting it even if the university is good. What advice on the university, it's job prospects etc. I am a fresh undergrad going directly for masters.

To the upcoming applicants for MSCS or any program in US, please don’t select university based on prestige while compromising with location, finance or anything else. Your visa acceptance is based 10% on your answers and 90% on your luck. University tier literally does not matter. And believe me when I say this, the mood of visa officer, your luck plays a huge factor.

I was student for fall 2026 at SBU MSCS, my visa interview was only 30 seconds and no question were asked which can reach to a conclusion.

I was very active in this subreddit to filter universities and many people were telling to not go to NEU, ASU, other cash cows or not so very known university. The visa acceptance has nothing to do with that infact I have seen many people got accepted to NEU and ASU.

My point is don’t believe too much on someone else’s words and select university which fits your needs. If you have a friend group going to some lower prestige college let’s say UTD, while you are getting NYU. Don’t just select NYU because it has good visa acceptance rate according to this subreddit. Look at other factors, if you are fine with more cost, alone living, etc go for it.

Also, the case might be different for other countries but this post was specifically for Indian students.

I understand that AI is on a boom and everyone wants to be on the AI train.

Every profile question I see has some mention of AI/ML in their post. In most of the cases, they just took a course in their bachelors and did some research with a prof later.

I think this trend of AI mention in the SOP might hurt the application more than the other way around. A better approach will be to use something which you actually worked on in your current role. This will make your SOP unique and will lie in a less cluttered area.

I am not implying to not mention if you actually worked as an AI engineer, but it should be a worthy mention.

Further, I think even the admission committee is flooded with applications with AI interest. Showing that you want to build on something which you have actual experience might convince them better. Later, you can take whatever courses or pursue any research you want.

Just saw a post of someone doing the same, thought I'd pitch in to share oversight, might help anyone in case.

My profile isn't the greatest ngl, but it is what it is ;-;
P.s: The profile was at the time of application

I got rejected by:

Purdue University
UC San Diego
UCLA
UIUC
Carnegie Mellon University
Duke University
Columbia University
University of Washington
University of Michigan Ann Arbor

Got accepted in NYU Courant for their CS program

- Indian citizen
- Tier 1/2 Uni, debatable honestly
- GPA: 3.4
- GRE: 314
- IELTS: 8.5

Research:
- At the time of application I had the following 2 papers:

• An NLP/ML paper which got published in a decent conference, not the best of my works but wtev
• A hybrid Quantum and ML research paper which was industry collaborated, spent like an year to get the research done for the paper. This was a solid one published in a decent conference as well.

- I have 2 more papers lined up which is a follow up for my quantum paper, I'll be applying both of them to NeurIPS, AAAI or IJCAI next year.

LOR:
- ML research professor from my university
- Quantum/ML professor as well
- Technical Manager at the company I work at

Experience:
- 1 Industry collaborated research Intern
- SWE Internship at a Forbes 200 company
- Got converted in the same company as a SWE, had a work ex of 2 yrs

My SOPs were good honestly, at that time it was my best work, but as with everything, I did realize I could've done better :/

The cycle this year was quite selective but honestly there were wayy better profiles, Im glad I could land NYU Courant, currently ranked in the T20 CS Programs, not too bummed about it.
Unfortunately I did decide to not to go to NYU, the program wasnt what i expected it to be. Ill be re-trying next year tho 😃 Good luck to the rest of ya'll anyways, amor fati ❤️

My stats weren’t crazy but worth a shot, now I learned more for when I reapply for the future :)

I got rejected by

UCSD
Columbia
UCLA
CMU MSCS
CMU MSML
NYU (I emailed them multiple times my transcript for months but they never updated my account so rejected by default?)

- US citizen
- top 30 school
- study abroad in #1 school in Korea
- GPA: 3.5

- no GRE

Research:
- 3 years of robotic + ML research (1 paper)
- did NLP graduate research class and made a paper and submitted (got rejected like a week ago lol)
- did personal Quant C++ research paper for fun

LOR:
- my PI would is well respected at my university
- NLP research professor also MIT alumni
- Professor who I TA with for 2 years

Teaching/leadership:
- about 3 different leadership roles
- 4 TA positions my last 2 years (NLP + Webdev)

Experiecne
- 2 FAANG SWE internship
- SWE internships at big social media app
- SWE startup internship
- ML startup internship

My essay was pretty good imo, worked on it for 6 months and got it reviewed by professional writers

Yeah there are like 100x more better profiles than me so I’m not butthurt. I already found a FT job so I’m doing that but I wish everyone else in the process still luck ! Don’t give up :))

Edit: I looked up the prices for JUST TUITION (no housing, food, healthcare, etc) and its around $120,000-$150,000 for some of these.

Guys I swear I see a new acronym every couple of months.

I constantly see people valuing some of these programs over tried and true programs (like Georgia Tech MSCS, TAMU MCSC, etc) just because it has the "CMU name brand" (and usually for like ~$100k-150k (literally like $200,00 if you include housing, food, etc)). Moreover many of these have uncertain outcomes as they have few cohorts of alumni. Not hating on CMU at all, some of their programs are legit and the research/courses are world class, but is really worth it most of the time? Theres like 30 of em and you can barely tell the difference between some

Here some of them -->

- MSCS — M.S. in Computer Science

- MCDS — Master of Computational Data Science

- MSML — M.S. in Machine Learning

- MSAII — M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation

- MIIS — M.S. in Intelligent Information Systems

- MLT — M.S. in Language Technologies

- MADS — M.S. in Applied Data Science

- MS-DAS — M.S. in Data Analytics for Science

- MSR — M.S. in Robotics

- MRSD — Master of Robotic Systems Development

- MSCV — M.S. in Computer Vision

- MHCI — Master of Human Computer Interaction

- MSLE — M.S. in Learning Engineering

- MSAIE — M.S. in Artificial Intelligence Engineering

- MSE — Master of Software Engineering

- MSE Online — Online Master of Software Engineering

- MSIN — M.S. in Information Networking

- MSIS — M.S. in Information Security

- MSAIE-IS — M.S. in Artificial Intelligence Engineering Information Security

- MSMITE — M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering

- MSIT-IS — M.S. in Information Technology Information Security

- MPE — Master’s in Privacy Engineering

- MPTP — Master in Privacy Technology and Policy

- MSSE — M.S. in Software Engineering

- MSAIE-ECE — M.S. in Artificial Intelligence Engineering ECE

- MSIT — M.S. in Information Technology

- MISM — Master of Information Systems Management

Hello all. I am new to this sub and Reddit. I am a 2025 arad, and apart from internships, I don't have any full-time work experience due to some personal reasons

I want to study abroad, and my actual goal is to pursue a PhD. I am waiting for decisions from Boston University MSDS) and Columbia Universitv (MSAI). Taking into account the current iob market in the US, should I even consider pursuing a master's abroad, or should I stay in India and pursue a master's at an international university like the University of York (Mumbai campus) or Illinois Tech Mumbai?

After waiting so long, I finally got a rejection from Columbia. Was a hell of a bumpy ride. My status disappeared on April 1, and then came back 2 days ago, and then I got rejected.

Feels a little bad but what can you do? Congratulations to all those who got in.

I am from a university which is not well known for sending students to us master's programs very few or none of my seniors have gone on to pursue an MS in the US. I am Indian but not based in India. applying for fall 2028. 3.8 gpa decent overall profile.

My question is whether top 20 programs will even consider my application? I hv heard that only IIT or top tier university students get considered, and most posts I've seen about top 20 MSCS admits are from IITs or tier 1/2 universities. Is this fact or myth? Do these programs genuinely consider applicants from lesser known or tier 3 universities, or is applying to top US schools pointless? My university's qs ranking is above 800.

Hi Everyone,

I am planning to apply for MS CS, MSML, and MCDS programs for the Fall 2027 intake. I'm looking for a realistic reality check on my profile and university shortlist. I will have 2.5 years of experience in AI and Data Engineering by the time applications start. Strictly targeting high paying industry roles (FinTech, Quant Dev, Big Tech AI) rather than a PhD.

1. Academic Background

• Undergrad: B.Tech in CS with Honors in AI/ML (Class of 2024) from a Tier 2.5 private university in India.
• CGPA: 9.56 / 10
• Standardized Tests: GRE planning to take in August (Target: 325–330, focusing on 168+ Quant).
• Additional Certifications: Passed CFA Level 1 (to signal strong quantitative stamina).

2. Research & Publications

• Publications: 8 papers (mix of IEEE conferences and preprints) covering NLP, Vision-Language Models, GANs, and Audio Steganography
• Google Scholar Stats: 35 Citations, h-index of 4, i10-index of 1.

3. Work Experience - Will have 2.5 YOE by the time applications start

• Current: AI/Data Engineer Consultant at a research lab, building a large scale agentic RAG platform over scientific publications data.
• Past: Associate Data Engineer at a major private bank
• Internships: 2 Data Science internships (one US startup remote, one domestic).

4. LORs

• Academic: 1 from B.Tech Department Head (HOD) + 1 from CS Professor (published research with both).
• Professional: 1 from a Swiss corporate client-side manager

5. Current considerations

• CMU
• UIUC
• Georgia Tech
• UCSD
• UMD CP
• UWM
• ETH Zurich, EPFL (considering for high ROI)

Question - are my current considerations too ambitious given a non IIT/NIT bachelors?

I’d appreciate suggestions for other universities that would fit my profile.
Any tips would be good on how i can possibly improve my profile until the applications start.

Cheers!

Should I pursue MS in US (UT Austin MSITM) or stay in India? Need genuine advice
My background:
• Software engineer with 6 years of experience
• Worked across e-commerce, fintech, and fantasy gaming companies
• Current CTC: ~70 LPA in India
Admissions received:
• UT Austin – MSITM (finalized this one)
• Georgia Tech – OMSCS
• Purdue
• A couple of other universities
My dilemma:
• I finalized UT Austin MSITM hoping it would give me an edge to land a job in the US, break into Big Tech, and open doors to better long-term opportunities
• However, almost everyone I know in the US is telling me this is not a good time to move there (job market, visa situation, layoffs, etc.)
• Now I’m genuinely confused about whether to go ahead with it
Options I’m weighing:
1. Go ahead with UT Austin MSITM as planned
2. Stay in India and switch to companies focused on AI/ML
3. Skip the MS, build more experience in India, and try for a direct US transfer (L1/H1B) through an MNC in a few years
Question for the community:
Given the current US job market and immigration climate, is the MS still worth it for someone already 6 years into their career with a decent package? Or am I better off doubling down in India? Would love to hear from folks who’ve been through this decision recently — especially those who moved (or chose not to) in the last 1–2 years.