I graduated from the University of Virginia (UVA) in 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science with a 3.45 GPA. I chose UVA because of 3 primary reasons: location, financials, and reputation.
I have lived in Virginia my entire life and never really considered where I was going to go to college until it became time to start applying. Therefore, I just mass applied to schools in Virginia and some out of state schools that I had heard in passing. My strategy was to backload researching the schools that I got into instead of wasting time that could be spent preparing for IB exams. Coincidentally, UVA was the first school to send back their decision. I was accepted into UVA's College of Arts and Sciences, a decision I made rashly, thinking I was going to go to school for some sort of business/economics degree.
After researching tuition and financial-adjacent information, it was clear that UVA was unbeatable. Because I was an in-state student, I was able to attend for zero-cost. This was a big deal for me, as I was very hesitant to pay for schooling in the first place. I almost-nearly accepted the offer on the spot, still very early in the cycle. My intuition was that although I could get into (arguably?) better schools, there really wasn't a point in paying for them.
As I mentioned earlier, I was planning on going to school for something business degree related. I had literally zero exposure to computer science before, so UVA's CS program was not a factor in my decision. The reputation for their commerce school is what initially sealed the deal for me. However, after simply one semester of the commerce school's intro class, I had completely lost any interest in going forward with it. That first semester, I took an intro philosophy, intro Chinese language, intro economics, intro CS, intro commerce, and some random math class that I was going to need to graduate 4 years later. My strategy for the next semester was continue the branches of classes I enjoyed, and replace the ones I didn't with completely unrelated classes. My second semester, the only continuous branch left was CS and philosophy.
Relating to CS, I am mostly interested in network security, network architecture, and anti-cheat software. Unrelating to CS, I am interested in ICE-powered vehicles and their systems, innovative music/art/clothing, and computers. I enjoy mostly anything that could be construed as competitive.