u/metalreflectslime wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
When you were in 12th grade, what other undergraduate schools did you get accepted to? Which undergraduate schools rejected you? When you were a 4th year undergraduate student, what other graduate schools accepted you? Which graduate schools rejected you? For graduate school, d
u/michaelnovati replied ·
For undergrad:
I was only looking at Canadians schools. The cost of my tuition was $5000 year and I could go to very good schools.
I applied to 3 schools (you could only apply to 3 without paying more I think at the time)
University of Toronto - Engineering Science (this is a specific program within engineering there that is competitive with the top schools in the world. It's the hardest program to get into in the country and 1/3 of the students are forced to switch out after first year). 5 year program with one year internships.
University of Waterloo (famous co-op program). 5 year program with 6 4 month coops
Queens University (next best school in Ontario)
I got into all three with scholarships and chose Engineering Science.
In retrospect if you wanted to get a job I would recommend Waterloo, you end up graduating with 6 internships and you have a leg up.
I wanted to go to grad school.
For graduate:
Applied to way more and only to PhD programs directly from undergrad. in Canada it's actually not common to do this. You normally get a masters first, but in the United States. if you have published research as an undergrad, then you can get into the top PhD programs.
I published a paper that won a best paper award at the top HCI conference so I had a chance.
I applied to the programs that had the best human computer interaction departments and specific professors. The top schools have generally good programs and there's a couple of schools that you may not think of that have some legendary human computer interaction, professors, people who have significantly impacted the industry over decades.
I applied to Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, UW, Maryland, Cornell, and maybe others that I forget. I visited all those except for Stanford because I was rejected.
Ultimately my undergrad thesis professors reference was the crtical factor.
I chose UW because they had a ton of industry partnerships with companies in Seattle like Microsoft and Microsoft research was the top publishing human computer interaction unit outside of academia, so it was one of the best places you could do internships with at the time.
Stanford has a tiny HCI program, but it's great, and was still my top choice because of the location, but UW was really one of the best choices for industry focused PhD.
Some of these programs were computer science and some were information science because human computer interaction spans many disciplines and has different homes at different schools. Generally wanted to stay in computer science though because the actual coursework, professors, and industry relationships were stronger for what I was looking for.
I was all set and ready to start but during my Facebook internship Mark Zuckerberg asked me to stay so felt more wanted there than at UW haha.