Fall 2018 | MS | CS | GRE 329 | TOEFL 109

Hi seniors,

I'm targeting masters in CS and I'm interested in subjects like big data analytics, distributed systems and databases, so I'll be going for a big data or systems specialization. My profile is as follows:

1. GRE: 329
2. TOEFL: 109
3. CGPA: 71.5
4. College: Delhi Technological University
5. Have completed 4 major projects in college, one on image steganography, 2 on hadoop and one on data mining.
6. Undertook a winter training at HP in C#/.NET technologies
7. Working at ZS Associates as a Business Technology Analyst, have 8 months of experience.

I'm targeting the following universities. Kindly let me know if this is fine or can I go for more ambitious universities.

1. Stony Brook - applied
2. ASU - applied
3. NYU Tandon - applied
4. NCSU
5. TAMU
6. USC
7. UC Irvine
8. UIUC
9. Georgia Tech
10. CMU

Under consideration
1. MIT
2. UC Berkeley
3. Columbia
4. UT Austin

How should I go about this? Should I replace some of the universities like TAMU, UC Irvine etc with these? I'm not sure whether that would be a right move as I might not get accepted into these ones. In short, can I afford to go after all the super ambi universities only?

Let me know your views on this list