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How to Choose Between CS Master's Offers in the US

The Fall 2025 students I've mentored have already received quite a few offers and are now deciding on their final destinations. I hope everyone can enjoy their last undergraduate break while landing on a satisfying choice. This article is specifically for students whose goal is to find an SWE internship in the US and then aim for a return offer.

  1. Principle 1: Choose a 1.5-year or 2-year program so you have the opportunity for a summer internship and can aim for a return offer to stay on.

  2. How do you know if a 1-year program is right for you? I think you can use a simple standard: you have 9+ months of undergraduate internship experience / 1+ year of full-time experience after graduating / you have an internship at a BAT-level (top Chinese tech) company with an SSP return offer. If you meet any one of these three criteria, you can go for Yale MSCS 1 Year / UCB EECS MEng.

  3. Don't use historical employment data as a reference for choosing your offer. Landing a job correlates far more with individual ability than with the school. Seniors may have won first place in some AI competition and collectively received intern offers, or a research advisor may have directly contacted HR to get them an intern offer (which typically requires extremely strong contributions and output), or they may have interned at ByteDance in China and received a return new grad offer for ByteDance North America (these are all real data points from people around me). These cases generally aren't very instructive.

  4. Does geographic location matter? Not really — interviews are all virtual. Being on the East Coast won't give you significantly more fintech opportunities either.

  5. Should you choose a program with a heavy workload or a light workload? A heavy-workload program eats into your LeetCode grinding time — you won't have much time to submit applications and grind LeetCode or practice behavioral questions. While others are memorizing Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles and "Customer Obsession," you're still doing your OS homework. A light-workload program may make you feel like you wasted your tuition, and when asked "What's your most proudest project?" in an interview, you might not have much to say.

    Based on my personal experience, if you can't find a program that's well-balanced in all aspects, go with a lighter-workload program. You can work on high-impact projects during undergrad or after you've landed a job.

  6. Does school ranking matter? Not really. Stanford might matter. Everything else comes down to you. Going to a state university won't prevent you from getting an Amazon interview.

  7. Is there a difference between CS/EE/ECE when job hunting? Not really. Job hunting mainly depends on your internship experience. As long as your major is CS/SE-related, you won't get filtered out because of your major's name.

  8. Be cautious about choosing quarter-system schools. Because quarter-system schools have later summer breaks, you'll receive offers with later onboarding dates, which creates two issues: 1) Some smaller companies won't wait for you until late June — even if you pass the interviews, you may not be able to start. 2) By the time your internship ends, return offer headcount may be tight. In 2022, this happened at Meta — even AEs couldn't get return offers.

  9. How to choose if you're planning to return to China for work? Go all-in on prestige (e.g., higher overall ranking is better), then choose a light-workload program and build your own full-stack projects. In China, resume screening almost exclusively looks at school ranking and internship experience. Don't use admission threshold as a criterion for school selection — no HR cares about it (they don't even know about it). Whether you pass an interview is overwhelmingly determined by your interview performance.