hungryturtle

Hi all, I've been admitted to USC and UMass Amherst for CS Ph.D. program. Both schools are almost equally attractive to me, so I thought I would like to listen what you people would choose if you were in my shoes. I will make a decision after visiting the two schools soon and talking to the faculty and grad students, but any comment would be helpful for me! My research interests are information retrieval/extraction and social network analysis. UMass is highly known for its IR research with great faculty members (several big guys in the field). UMass offers $27,000 stipend for the first year, and then I need to find assistantship, such as RA/TA. USC, on the other hand, has a big research center (Information Science Institute), which does research on various topics on information integration on Web, social media analysis, etc. USC offers me a graduate fellowship which guarantees for four years of funding ($30,000) including first two years of no obligations. It's nice to know that I don't need to worry about funding throughout my Ph.D.. I do love nice weather in California, but I am also afraid of dangerous neighborhood as I heard. I also do not enjoy living in a big city. I think I will know better where I want to spend next (at least) five years once I visit there and talk to people, but I would like to know your opinions too! Any comment would be appreciated, thanks.

Yes, they are used interchangeably.

Yeap, it just doesn't make any sense that they wouldn't send out admissions until now if I got in when the visiting day is Feb 28? or March 1. So I moved on!

It was one school that I really wanted to go.. so it's painful to keep the last hope. I should now safely assume that I am rejected if I haven't heard back from UW yet, should I?

Ah, is anyone who got into AI/ML group in UW in this forum? Should I assume reject if I haven't heard back yet? I see a few admission postings already.. :'(

This basically looks like an admission to me. Congrats!

I'm getting frustrated to find out that people are getting admission phone calls from UW. With the same pattern with the last year, it seems that UW gives admission phone calls for a couple of days (2/1-2/3) and then sends a bunch of rejection emails soon, like 2/4. I see one person who got a call from UW AI group. Congrats! I can't envy you enough...lol. May I ask who called to deliver the news? Was it a POI?

Hi all, I got an email from a professor from one of the schools I applied for, and she says that she would like to talk to me to see if I am a good fit for their department, and she would like to answer my questions about their Ph.D. program and life in there. While I am excited about this interview request, I am a bit confused because this email was not from a POI that I mentioned in my SOP. I am not sure if she is interviewing me as one of the admission committee, or as a potential advisor who's interested in having me. Her research interests are not exactly the perfect match with my research interests.. Maybe she is just a recruiting faculty? Should I be studying her papers just in case? After the interview, would it be okay to ask her that directly?

@dat_nerd Thanks for the information. My research focus lies in the fields of information retrieval and web data mining. What about you?

@dat_nerd I applied for MIT, Stanford, CMU, Cornell, UW, UIUC, UMass, Purdue, USC, UCLA. Wow, I see that you've been already accepted to three of your list. I envy you so much since I haven't heard anything from my schools yet, lol BTW, I guess you're probably the one who posted admission from UMass. May I ask if it was an official email or unofficial one from POI?

Hi all, I haven't contacted any professor until very recently I decided to email one that I really want to work with. I have thought that contacting professor wouldn't really affect your admission except for rare cases where you can really impress the professor some ways, but I'm not sure anymore about that since I even see the cases that people who didn't get their admissions in the first round finally receive admission after they contact their POI and things work out well. I first assumed that as I mention my POI names in my SOP, my POIs would get a chance to read my SOP and consider me as a prospect student. However, I realized that if my POI's not in the committee and no one asks for his opinion for my application, maybe my file just slips away without giving a shot of impressing my POI. In that sense, do you think sending emails to my POI just to introduce myself at this stage would help? It wouldn't hurt, would it? I'm starting to think that the worst that can happen is for them to ignore my emails. What do you think?

@txafter @OhMySocks thanks for your replies. I might have to wait anyway to see the result.. i hope he doesn't forget about me by the time he reviews my application.

I've contacted one professor that I am really interested in working with. In the contact email, I briefly introduced myself, and told him that I've been particularly interested in research that his group does. I also suggested my idea to improve a current method published in one of the papers by his group, and let him know that I also have done similar research throughout my master's program. Anyway, he responded in a day, "Very interesting work. Have you applied to our phd program?". I was so happy to get his attention, and immediately responded to let him know that I have applied for their phd program. I thought he might ask for an interview to discuss further, but he has never responded back for days since then. Does this mean that he was just being polite and respond to the email out of courtesy, but he's not really interested?