bubobi

i know that visa clearance can take up to 2 motnhs, for sure; a friend of mine had that experience... so, it's good that you applied as early as possible

there is a huge difference for F-2 / J-2 (spouse's visa) F-2 is not allowed to work. J-2 is fine to work.

just compare http://www.cs.nyu.edu/web/Research/Groups/ and http://www.cs.ucla.edu/csd/research/labs.html it's obvious that NYU is pretty good in NLP, Computer Graphics (and related stuff), Security & Cryptography, Parallel and Distributed systems, Prog.Lang. & Compilers,... but I guess that there is no "real" software engineering

but if you give them enough information to identify you, what can stop them from using the information you have provided in the forum against you ?

Although I agree that NYU isn't comparable to UCLA, I believe that NYU is a way better than UCLA, i.e. at least in CS areas it is well known. By the way, all CS departments come from math or engineering schools, so there is no much difference here. In fact, the CS program doesn't have any "obscure math stuff" you are speaking about... A friend of mine turned down UCSD and Cornell for NYU...

why don't someone create a web site with a copy of those rankings :) !?

no, it won't be cancelled - you will have different visas for different stays in US (f1 - study; b1/b2 - business/tourism) if you don't check this site a lot, why do you ask here :P !?

so is the quant. section of general gre but so what ? - the higher your score, the better you chances

http://imdb.com/name/nm0000204/

though quite interesting, I find it inadequate, e.g. I can hardly believe that only two Russian universities deserve to be ranked in top 500 (in fact, any large-scale ranking is prone to be biased) THANKS for posting it, anyway

if you had both of them, which one would you pick?

I guess that the expert for this would be dragonfinity. my best friend told that Atlanta is not that great city; in fact, he suggested I would not like it, so I should consider other schools, if it is not my top choice... but in your case, it seems to be the best school

where from do you have that multi-nation related information ?:hmm:

I hope you would have a success with Brown.. ...but if not: You profile is decent enough for those schools, but you should know that recommendations are extremely important (you don't seem happy with yours...) Speaking about MIT and CMU, it takes an excellent profile, a bit of luck, and research, research & research experience to get there; and even that might not be enough... so don't be too disappointed about them. Brown and UPenn are good schools, but you should have applied to more than 4 schools; i.e. severeal dreams schools (hard to get in), many likely-to-get-in schools, and a few easy-to-get-in schools... If you are going to reapply, you should apply to more top 5-20 schools. Some of they are absolutely great schools with top profs and so on (even though there are not mit/cmu/berkeley/stanford). There is NO need to retake GRE / Toefl; you should consider taking GRE Computer Science test, though. In summary, continue your research, write a couple of papers if possible, improve your recs, and reapply.

why !? - if you go to CA, you would find it hard to study due to the wonderful weather and beautiful seaside :) ?