Location, location, location

The location of the university you attend will have a big impact on your overall choices in addition to other factors like ranking, reputation. Being close to an industry hub can mean the difference between getting a job or not getting a job. Especially during recessions employers are reluctant to spend money on hiring candidates who live far away from their locations. So if you have a choice between 2 similarly ranked universities it might help to choose the one close to the jobs. It might help to start out with a Google Map to track the various regions I refer to below.

Silicon Valley
For the technology industry there is no place like Silicon Valley. As you've probably heard this is the region between San Francisco and San Jose. The advantages are the number of companies, the great weather, the choice of outdoor activities (from beaches in Santa Cruz to skiing in Tahoe and Yosemite) within a 4 hour radius. The downside is that the cost of living is really high. Even individuals who have lived in the Bay Area for 5 years may not be able to afford those million dollar hovels. Every city has one prominent company... Santa Clara has Intel, Mountain View has Google, Palo Alto has HP, Sunnyvale has AMD, Cupertino has Apple.

Southern California
Los Angeles and San Diego areas also have a lot of job opportunities. The big employers in the area are Qualcomm and Broadcom on the semiconductor side. San Diego is said to be a hub for telecommunications businesses. The great California weather gets better here if you like warmth. UCSD, UCLA, USC are the large recognizable universities in the area. Caltech in Pasadena is another choice if you're doing really well in college.

Texas
Texas is also great region for jobs. Austin, Dallas and Houston are the big cities here. Austin is the place most people talk about these days. UT Austin is the top school in the area and there are also a large number of companies in Austin such as AMD, ARM, Intel, IBM and the outposts of most other tech companies. Dallas has Texas Instruments and Dallas Semiconductor to name a few. The Houston area also has several large employers like oil companies, and Continental Airlines. Some of the advantages of living in Texas are a low cost of living, cheap houses and no state taxes. The weather is probably a tad too hot in the summer months.

Raleigh Durham : North Carolina
This is another fast growing region, with decent weather and a large number of employers. Three good schools in this region are Duke, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. This is probably a reason why most large companies have offices in NC now.

North East
The Boston to Washington DC corridor is another popular area for students. Boston has a large number of excellent universities and the Route-128 technology corridor with numerous companies and many others in the region from New Hampshire to Rhode Island. New York metro area has a large number of financial companies, publishing houses. Hartford about 2 hours north of New York is the insurance capital of the US, although Yale is the only highly rated university around.

A Recommendation for your recommendation letters

All graduate programs will require you to submit 2-3 recommendation letters as a part of your application. If you are still studying, you'll probably have to ask your professors for recommendations. Choose professors with better qualifications or teachers who taught courses related to the field you plan to specialize in. An external project guide might also be a good person to ask as well, to show some diversity in your references. If you have started working, you'll probably want to ask at least one person from work for a reference. Here are a few tips for your recommendations:

Access to recommendation letters
Most universities will allow you to choose to keep access to the recommendation letters. If you are not sure whether one of your references will write a good letter for you, it might be worthwhile to keep access to the letter. You could then delete the letter and substitute it with the letter from another recommender if needed.

Writing your own recommendations
A lot of your recommenders are probably busy people. They may ask you to give them a rough draft of the recommendation. So you do have some control over the content of the recommendation. If you need to write drafts for all 3 letters, it might make sense to ask your parents/friends to write some of the letters so that there is some variation in the language or tone of the writing.

The Immigration Mess

An important thing to consider if you are planning to study in the US is the immigration mess. Personally if I had understood the problems in advance, I would have been reluctant to work here. So here is a brief summary.

H1B visas
H1B visas allow a foreigner to work temporarily in the US for 6 years. Last year it was a challenge to get one, but this year it looks okay with the recession. Depending on when you graduate this can be a problem for you, if there are too many people with American graduate degrees.

Green Cards
Most people move to the US from Asia with the intention of achieving permanent residency. If you are from India or China you are in deep trouble at this point in time. The US gives about 3000 Green Cards per country per year for the EB-2 category (graduate degree holders or 5 years of work experience) for all countries. So if you are from a populous country like India or China, the demand far outstrips supply. According to an interview with the USCIS chief, Charles Oppenheim, there are about 60,000 people from India in the EB-2 Green Card line if you count applicants until July 2007. So that's 20 years to a Green Card right there, unless people start losing jobs ahead of you, move back to India, laws change so that we get more visas.

Why should you care?
So the longer you spend in the line, you start realizing how many limitations this puts on you. Once the first 6 years on your H1 finish, you can only renew your H1 every year, provided you have completed 2 stages of your Green Card application (a 3 stage process). Also there are limitations on switching fields, switching companies, starting your own company. In general you have to stick to your current job profile for as long as you have a Green Card application in flight, which I already told you is about 20 years if you were born in India/China. Also your spouse cannot work on a H4 dependent visa. Employment authorization for spouses is provided close to the end of the Green Card process. No intelligent spouse will be willing to put up with that for 20 years. Of course your spouse can get his/her own H1 visa.

I am brushing over a lot of details here but my personal opinion is that America isn't the right place for new immigrants from India and China for the longer term given the current laws. In any case all the top American companies have offices in India now, so there is little to gain by staying in America apart from the American lifestyle. America is a great place to learn though, so it is worthwhile getting an American degree.