What are my chances of getting into a really good University?

What are my chances of getting a top 20 university for MS in CS (spec. Database and Information Systems or related field) based on my profile? Also, how good are NUS/NTU and U of Toronto for my field of interest?

• I'm considering the following universities: 1. Stanford University 2. UIUC 3. Georgia Tech 4. Michigan Ann Arbor 5. University of Texas, Austin 6. CMU LTI 7. UC San Diego 8. UC Los Angeles 9. Purdue University. 10. University of Wisconsin, Madisson 11. University of Maryland, College Park. 12. USC GRE: 325 (166Q 159V 4.5AWA) TOEFL: 113 GPA 9.01 (Top 10% of class). UG University: PESIT, Bangalore. Workex/Internships -2 month internship at DRDO in field of Data Mining. -Working as S/W Engineer at Akamai Technologies since July (4 months so far) on database related stuff. 5 Publications: 1 first-author at ASONAM 2013, quite a reputed conference. (social network anonymization) 1 second-author at HIS 2012, international conference. (data-mining) 1 journal publication in IJDKP, not-so-great international journal. (data-mining) 2 Book Chapters in Springer. (social network privacy) My publications related to social network privacy/anonymization are in a way related to data-mining as they focus on anonymizing the data to be published (for social network mining) while maintaining its usability. Letters of Recommendation from my mentor at DRDO, a senior prof. at PESIT under whom I wrote the ASONAM paper, and another prof. who taught me in database systems. Won a bunch of programming competitions in college tech fests. Played chess for the university team. I'm a bit worried about my GRE Quant score.

• Answer:

  You sound like you have excellent qualifications and strong recommendation letters. As long as you write a compelling statement of purpose I think you have a good shot at getting accepted into the schools you've listed.  GRE score is slightly low, average quant score at top schools is 168-170 I think, but it should be good enough to get you past the initial filtering that admissions committees do.  There is a bit of randomness involved in the grad school admissions process, so my recommendation is to apply to as many schools as you can. I'm sure you'll get into at least a few.