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Caltech MSEE

Program Overview

LA weather is unbeatable, school prestige is unbeatable, and the number of admitted students is far fewer than Stanford. Very friendly for career changers to CS: of the 135 credits required to graduate, only 54 need to be EE classes. Many CS courses, such as the well-known 156 Learning Systems, are cross-labeled as CS-EE, so in theory you could take all CS courses and still graduate.

The program is 9 months long, but can be extended by half a year.

Admission Preferences

15 students admitted per year. About 1/3 are mainland China undergrads, basically from Tsinghua, Peking, and C5 universities. The rest are international undergrads.

Admission Data Points

  1. SYSU Physics undergrad (dropped out), UCI CS+EE undergrad, GPA 3.98, visiting researcher at Stanford
  2. Purdue EE undergrad, 8 semesters on Dean's List, 1 year 9 months RA
  3. NCSU EE undergrad, GPA 4.0
  4. NTU (Taiwan) EE+Finance undergrad, GPA 4.18, two years RA at Academia Sinica
  5. NTU (Taiwan) EE undergrad, GPA 4.29/4.3

New Grad Job Outcomes

Fewer go into SDE roles, but those who do basically all end up at big tech companies.