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Columbia MSCE

Program Overview

A 1.5-year program. You can do a summer internship, but fall co-op is not supported. There is a thesis option — if you find a professor, you can extend your graduation timeline.

Job Hunting Review

The school's career fair is basically useless. I heard that Bloomberg used to be a safety net, but now I have not heard of anyone landing there either. However, among people around me, those who applied early could still get interviews. As a data point: I had zero internships and still passed the resume screening and received offers from Meta and Amazon. But it is true that Columbia is not a target school for some companies. With zero internships, I aced the Uber and Snowflake OAs but got rejected anyway. A classmate with multiple FAANG internships also got rejected after getting perfect scores on OAs. For job hunting, public school programs like UIUC and UCSD CS75 are definitely better.

Course Review

There is a common misconception that Columbia has a heavy workload because of four courses per semester — this is actually wrong. CE has extremely flexible course selection: you can freely take CS courses, and CE and MSCS have the same priority for CS course enrollment. Five core courses can all be software-focused, and there are many easy course options. Here are a few recommendations with workload basically equal to zero: Modeling: counts as a core course. It is a statistics course. If you took an undergrad stats course covering multidimensional random walks, you can coast on prior knowledge. Verification: core course. Similar to discrete math, covering FSMs and logic. Data Center Processing: core course. Group project to write a short paper.

Admission Info & Data Points

There are about 60 students total, roughly 60% Chinese, 30% Indian. The Chinese students' backgrounds are quite diverse — mainland Chinese undergrads range from second-tier universities to Peking University, and US undergrads come from various schools.

  1. Bard College at Simon's Rock, Physics undergrad, GPA 4.0
  2. Purdue University CS undergrad, 5 years full-time at Microsoft
  3. University of Nottingham Ningbo China, CS undergrad, two-month small-company internship
  4. Union College CE undergrad
  5. NYU CE undergrad
  6. OSU CE undergrad

Choosing Between MSCS and CE

The admission threshold for CS is higher and can sometimes be unpredictable. Since the engineering school only allows you to apply to one program, if — like me — you definitely want to be in New York, I recommend CE. After all, in Manhattan your only options are Columbia and NYU.