CMU/Stanford is full of grad students who went to so-called lesser ranked schools. You could also do the background work and get one of your professors to write

CMU/Stanford is full of grad students who went to so-called lesser ranked schools. You could also do the background work and get one of your professors to write a recommendation for you to attend the Oregon Programming Language Summer School or other summer conference where you can learn from these Stanford/CMU/MIT professors and other students. https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer17/schedule.php https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer17/sc... a friend of mine did this every summer and hustled a lot of internships out of it working in research at top schools because they remembered his name from the conference and emailed him when looking for interns after they received grant money.