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What Students Say
Likes
- Beautiful campus
- Great opportunities for getting an on-campus job (95% of us eventually get one)
- Private university which means having a good teacher to student ratio
Dislikes
- The tuition can be quite expensive as compared to public universities
- Financial aid isn't usually provided by the department (school of engineering)
- The quarter system leads to having only 11 weeks for a course which can be less
Course Curriculum
- The difficulty of courses is medium. not super tough unless you take advanced courses
- The positive aspect is professors - all of them have experience from the bay area which is good to know and learn about.
- The negative aspect is duration - since its only 11 weeks, it gets difficult to learn about a topic in absolute depth
- Every class occurs twice a week for 2 hours each.
Admission Experience
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Santa Clara University (Accepted Admission)
Arizona state university (got acceptance)
New Jersey institute of technology (got acceptance)
stevens institute of technology (got acceptance)
University of Maryland - Baltimore County (got acceptance)
UC Santa Cruz (got rejected) -
I think the reason for rejection from UC Santa Cruz was because I applied on the date right before the deadline. Prestigious universities like UC can give preference to early candidates and I missed out on that opportunity.
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From all the colleges I got an acceptance from, I liked Santa Clara University primarily because I wasn't restricted to a particular course track and had a lot of flexibility in taking the course I want. Graduation requires having 46 credits which ultimately means that I can take up a lot of good and important courses. The university is also in the bay area which has weather similar to Mumbai (where I am from) and since I had to spend two years (and more) here, I didn't want to go to other states where weather is pretty harsh. Additionally, it's in the Silicon Valley which can be a big big advantage as you get to attend a lot of events locally, visit company campuses which can be a good thing overall.
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For admission at SCU, the things required are:
- GRE, TOEFL scores
- WES Evaluation
- Undergrad transcripts
- only SOP -
There are no minimum score requirements mentioned and the admission is done pretty smoothly. No hassle. The university also gives out its decision for your admission within a week so it's easier to make a decision going forward. The only thing is that to confirm your seat, you are given 14 days to pay the deposit (which is later cut from the fees you pay) and so you need to decide on it quickly
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I applied for the Fall 2023 intake. Applied for the MS CS program in January and got a response from the university within a week which I eventually accepted within the two weeks deadline given by the university
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The admission process is super simple to follow through the portal and easily trackable. The university team is responsive to all the emails as well.
Faculty
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Faculty members can sometimes help exceptional students or someone who actively participates in the class
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I really liked the Distributed Systems course taught by Professor Ramin Moazenni - he is an exceptional teacher with a lot of practical knowledge and also the Machine Learning course by Yen-Kuang Chen. Highly recommended
-30 students per class at max
-About 60% of students enrolled in grad program are indians
-Faculty to student ratio is 30:1 which helps in connecting personally with the professor. -
The teaching methodology depends on the professor you take the course under but I would highly recommend talking to seniors or checking online about that professor before you decide to take. overall, they're all pretty good.
Campus Life
- Only 1 main campus with all the department buildings.There's a huge library which also has a lot of on-campus opportunities
- The gym is good with a swimming pool, 3-4 huge soccer fields, baseball fields, tennis courrts, volleyball courts, basketball stadium, and on-campus health center too
- There's an indian grad organization named 'Swades' and they organize a lot of cultural events
Part Time Jobs
- Getting an RA position is tough, you need to be super good for professors to consider you for that.
- Getting a TA position is tougher as professors are usually looking for great subject expertise
- However, getting a grader job is quite easy and about 20% of students in my batch were able to land one
- There are plenty of other on-campus jobs which students can try - at library, gym, cafeteria, catering and other department buildings which offer desk job
- Its not very difficult to land an on-campus job if you are persistent enough
- The minimum wage is $17 and goes upto $24. its not very difficult to land an on-campus job if you are persistent enough. the easiest way to land an on-campus job is to go and meet people in-person and express your interest or keep mailing them every week. additionally, there's also a workday portal where people can apply formally and sometimes they receive a callback for an interview/hiring
Placement
- I haven't graduated yet so difficult to tell but I think about 40-50% people have gotten full-time jobs from the previous batch
- Don't really know about average salary but it could be looked on the Glassdoor pages of every company so that's easy
- You need connections for referrals, cold emailing or applying directly on the portal to get an opportunity to interview for the job.there are career fairs but they're hardly useful
- Students ideally need to attend off-campus events organized by the companies which they should keep an eye out for through university handshake portal etc
Accommodation
- I live with my cousin so it wasn't difficult to find off-campus living,usually, just joining the university WhatsApp groups is enough to find roommates
- There are many apartment complexes around the university - Domicilio, Park Central, Normandy, Timberleaf etc. It's super easy to find housing and all of them have similar costs
- Most of the indian students live on the complex mentioned above
Exams
- GRE and TOEFL required (can be waived off in certain conditions possibly)
- A CV/Resume required along with an SOP (but the conditions would've changed recently)
- A WES Evaluation report required which can be easily obtained by following steps on the WES website.
- There was no interview conducted for the admission. They send an acceptance letter if you are accepted
- No LOR required which is good
Fees
- Tuition is paid every quarter. right now it's $1240 per credit so depending on the number of units you take in a quarter, the tuition is calculated appropriately.
- There's also a $190 grad engineering fee every quarter and one-time annual insurance fee ($3,700) which means for two years, you have to pay the insurance fee twice.
- Depending on the apartments you stay, the monthly rent can be around $700 with electricity and other things like utilities, food can come up to a maximum of $900-$100
Scholarship
- Unfortunately, no scholarships provided by school of engineering (that I have heard of)
- There is a possibility of you receiving a tuition-cover from a professor if you can get a research assistant position but it can be super rare
- I have received financial aid from my professor (which is different from a scholarship provided by the university)
