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Upenn EE

Program Overview​

Low admission threshold with a great title. However, you must take five ESE-prefixed courses; the rest is free electives. If you know nothing about hardware like me, you can take ESE courses in math, optimization, and ML, but they're all very advanced and can be intense (though irrelevant to SDE, since this is a pure EE program). Of course there are also easy courses to get you through graduation. You can transfer to or dual-enroll in CS or other programs conveniently. If your background is strong, it can serve as a safety school, or you can apply to the neighboring SCMP as a safety.

Workload is entirely determined by your course selection. You can check difficulty on Penn Course Review -- easy courses don't require showing up, but you can also take hardcore CIS courses.

Transfer process:

  1. First talk to the DATS advisor to confirm the target program is willing to accept you
  2. Submit an internal transfer application (no need to go through admissions again -- mainly based on coursework and GPA; for transferring to DS, ESE5420 CIS5450 ESE5000 -- you don't actually need both CIS5450 and CIS5190/5200)
  3. Graduate Affairs review
  4. Wait for Registrar to update the system (email says 7-10 business days)

Admission Threshold & Data Points​

Quite friendly, about 20% acceptance rate, GPA > 87 is worth trying.

  1. UPenn EE undergrad, GPA 3.9

Job Hunting​

Very few students go into software -- rarely see anyone looking for SDE positions. I know a few friends who went to hardware companies I'd never heard of. Personally, I applied to FAANG and got no responses -- might just be me being weak :(

Transferring Programs​

Transferring requires an A- or above in one algorithms / computational theory course. Both the professor and TA say transferring is fairly straightforward, but the coordinator says competition is fierce -- mysterious. I took the algorithms course: the first half is similar to LeetCode, and the second half covers P and NP. Exam difficulty doesn't exceed NOIP junior division problem 2 / Codeforces 1400 rating / AtCoder 800. I haven't ground LeetCode though... Homework does have a few hard problems.