[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

Since you know that you want to get a PHD and do a lot of research, I think that should part of your method of finding colleges. A grad student searches for colleges by finding out what professors are doing research in the area they want to research, and then looking at the college that professor is at. You should do something similar.

For example, I looked at NYIT's website and they don't seem to have a lot in the way of research, especially in the area of computer architecture, which if I remember correctly is what you want to do. Here's what I found: http://www.nyit.edu/engineering/centers/. They also didn't make it easy to find out what other research their faculty is doing. On the other hand, UC Berkley, has a research link right on their home page, which includes a section on undergraduate research. They also have a much better list of research within engineering. http://coe.berkeley.edu/research-centers for example, you might be interested in Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing, Berkeley Quantum Information & Computation Center, CHESS: Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, RAD Lab: Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems and TRUST: Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology

I think your list of colleges is great for someone who is career minded, like I was. They may do a better job preparing you to be immediately usefull in an engineering career then a research university. However, for what you want to do, they may not be the right choice.

You do make a great point. Thank you for pointing that out for me. Don't research universities tend to be huge? I was considering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but I disregarded it because of its size. Perhaps, I should reconsider the school choices. UC Berkley and UCLA are also on the "reach" side. I do have a chance at UCLA, but Berkley seems more unreachable. Stanford, Caltech and MIT are almost definitely denials just based on my academics. Perhaps, I'll be more open minded on the school sizes, but I am still very hesitant. Argh, this is hard.