Hello everyone,
My career goal is to reduce AI risks. If I major in CS, I could attend a top-tier college in Taiwan. In the future, I may pursue a master or PhD degree in US.
However, according to some EAs, chasing a high GPA is mostly for signaling rather than improving my research abilities, because some college courses are irrelevant to AI risks.(I'm uncretain about this view)
In Taiwan,** a person who gets a 3.8 GPA at a mid-tier college might only get a 3.2 GPA at a top-tier college due to grade deflation.**
When applying to master’s programs and internships in the U.S., GPA seems to matter much more than the college name in Taiwan, especially because U.S. evaluators may not know how large the difference in student ability is between top-tier and mid-tier Taiwanese schools.
So the choice may look like this:
It seems obvious that option 1 gives the weakest academic credential in the US. So** the choice may be between options 2 and 3**: whether it is worth investing around 1,000 extra hours to improve the “school name” on my resume.
What do you think is the best choice for an EA? If uncertain, what are your main cruxes?
Of course, there are still other advantages to choosing a top-tier school, such as better peers and research environment. However, these advantages seem to come at the high cost of spending more time maintaining GPA.
Please don’t aim for a rigorous answer. A one-minute gut intuition would already be very helpful. Thanks a lot for answering