Cambridge or NUS
So I got accepted into both Cambridge and NUS. But I am not sure that I want to go Cambridge.
Firstly, I have been holding the NUS global merit scholarship (GMS) offer since 2022 after getting my second IOI Gold. Honestly, after getting the NUS merit scholarship I stopped caring much about applying to overseas university since NUS honestly wasn’t a bad university to me.
But I think after going to NUS and meeting other prospective NUS CS students during my time in NS. I wasn’t sure that the network I will build in NUS would be the best. I realized that most prospective students have little or no experience writing code, and they managed to land a spot in NUS CS due to their A-level scores. Of course, there are those that managed to land a spot in NUS CS due to good results in NOI, but I don’t believe that that is the bulk of the students.
I decided to try applying for overseas univesities. I did not want to apply for US univesities because I did not want to write 10 essays for each school that I applied and end up being rejected by most school due to lack of extracirriculars. I didn’t really optimize much for applying to overseas unis during my HS years… Sure, MIT is worth applying for but I don’t really think my chances are that great due to the quota of one Singaporean per year. Also there was the entire SAT test, which I really wasn’t confident in getting a perfect score in due to English.
So I looked at UK universities, specifically Cambridge.
I had to pick Cambridge CS vs math. I picked math because the cambridge CS cirriculum genuinely did not seem much better than the NUS CS cirriculum so there was not much point going there. And all the strong CS majors come from US because the startup culture in US is something Europe seem to be unable to replicate. Furthermore, there were many prominent Singaporeans who had went to Cambridge Math (specifically Trinity) such as LHL and Lim Jeck. Having the oppurtunity to be interact (or even supervised) by world class mathematicians seemed really amazing for an undergrad.
However, I got rejected from Trinity and got pooled to St. Edmund’s which is a mature college. I am not sure how much my college life will be affected that. But if my supervisers wouldn’t be the world class trinity math professors, I don’t see how this is better than just going to NUS. NUS math professors are also world class. It was just that trinity math professors are really just in a class of their own.
I have asked around and it is true that I would be able to hang out with other trinity math students in their college, but I still think that having a really strong supervisor would be very beneficial. And one can easily check the math fellow in Trinity vs St. Edmund.
Furthermore, acedemically, I only see benefit in being supervised by these world class professors because you can find the lecture notes and some example sheets at https://dec41.user.srcf.net/notes/. Not to mention just self-studying from a math textbook.
The other advantage of NUS is it’s modular system. I wasn’t the most comfortable with only taking math courses at cambridge. So the modular system at NUS would allow me to take random modules if I feel like it. This would also allow me to take graduate level modules. So being not acedemically challenge in NUS definitely wold not be a problem if one spams enough level 5xxx modules. Whereas in cambridge, you are kind of constrained by the fixed cirriculum. But it is not like I don’t think I’ll be acedemically challenged. People say the example sheets are very difficult.
And not to mention, the number of modules in NUS that I am already exempted from in SOC. So I really speedup level 5xxx mods…
The main point is. Acedemically, I don’t think that going to either one of the schools would be definitely better over the other.
Furthermore, another concern is whether doing math only is a good idea. I was kind of job hunting for a bit before this to see if I could land a serious job right away to not waste time in university. And I think the main thing that is holding me back is that I do not actually know how to do software engineering. And this is a skill that probably can only be learnt by doing SWE internship and touching some company’s large codebase. But definitely a CS degree will help me in that department.
Furthermore, on the acedemic side. I am not sure what skills I should pick up from university. If ASI really comes in a few more years, then what is the point of doing univeristy if everyone does not need to do work because AI is better than them anyways. During my 2 years spent in military, I literally watched chatGPT go from 300 rated on codeforces and everyone saying there’s no way they will make an actually good model for CP. But now, more and more we are seeing that maybe CP is something “trivial” for AI anyways as slowly AI starts to get higher and higher elo. And I believe openAI already claimed that they have achieved an LGM AI.
I think I really didn’t understand what exponential growth in AI meant unless I saw it go from 300 to 3000 in the spam of 2 years. Now we extrapolate that for another 2 years. It is really scary to think about it. I genuinely thought before this that competitive progamming was probably peak of human creativity that was so accessible (not much prerequisite knowledge needed to appreciate crazy ad-hocs). But now with AIs trivializing CP, I am not sure what to think. Surely, after speaking with so many CPers, they all sort of agree that CP is really the most intellectually stimulating thing to them. And if this is trivialized by AI, what about other fields that are more heavy on prerequisite knowledge which machines will definitely be better at humans. In the words of someone I forgot, competitive programmers are kind of having their Lee Sedol moment.
Another thing is that I am not sure I want to go do acedemia anymore. By the time I get my phd, it will be 8 years into the future. By that time, it is proabbly almost certain that AI will be a better mathematician than me. And like the entire o3 getting 25% on frontier math is kind of a hinting that. Yes, one can admit that math acedemia is still funded despite negligible economic value (pure math). But what is the point of funding or even doing it when AI can literally solve everything for you?
And more importantly, if one is certain that in 3 years, the job market will be insanely bad due to ASI. What is the optimal thing to do now? Work? But I don’t think I am employable at my current state. I guess I can just NEET, but I don’t think that it good. So if I am going to univesity, not getting 400k in debt by going to cambridge seems like a decent strategy I guess.
So now, what is the pros of going to cambridge if it is not acedemic due to not going to Trinity?
- Branding
- Network
And the cons is spending 400k sgd on tuition. Whereas if I went to NUS, my scholarship gives me money…
As for the network, I am definitely certain the average NUS student would not be comparable to the average cambridge student. But one needs to realize that NUS CS intake alone is >1000 already (https://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/docs/info/student-statistics/enrolment-statistics/undergraduate-studies/ug-enrol-20232024.pdf). So a more fair comparison would be how the best of the respective cohorts are. In which I don’t have a definite answer to that.
So I really need to ask myself on whether the branding of being a cambridge graduate is worth 400k. I really am not concerned with being able to find jobs (right now, not in 3 years when ASI hits) in Singapore. Because the trading companies with Singapore offices would obviously find NUS students to hire. And I don’t really plan to work overseas. Singapore is nice. The only downside is I cannot siam reservist, but bopez lor. So would a cambridge degree really seem as a lot more prestigious than a NUS degree after a few years of working?
But another point of the networking side is how to make friends. I think there might be a significant difference between NUS and cambridge because of the modular system of NUS. For cambridge, I can reasonably expect to see roughly the same set of people for the first 2 years. But if I go to NUS and accelerate like crazy, I probably wouldn’t see many new faces. So it might be hard to make friends in NUS outside of clubs (which realistically for me will just be the ICPC people…).
I really don’t know how to make an informed decision on this. It is really hard to evaluate whether the cambridge experience is worth 400k