DSA

Also, remember that there is a large difference between a county and a country.

My approach was to let my letter-writers know about the application deadlines for each school, as in the deadlines I myself have. I didn't try to portray them as the cut-off point for recommendations to come in. But off the top of my head I don't know the recommender deadlines for each school -- some are a few days after, others are a few weeks. My recommenders are in academia and know the drill, and I know that they recognize that there's some less-defined buffer period after the applicant deadline. I would feel uncomfortable about micromanaging my recommenders further by giving them an earlier deadline -- it's just that the deadline I mention is the only deadline I'm actively aware of myself.

Phew! My third recommender has started to submit his recommendations. Just started getting the email notifications on that just now. I had left him a voicemail and attempted to reach him by phone a few times with no response, but I suppose it worked? Really happy about this!

My third letter-writer has been pretty uncommunicative, sadly. I first got a hold of him in May, and he said he'd be happy to do it. Kept him up to date with my ongoing application work, and had to prod him to get a response in October where he said he'd get the letters in in mid-November. Haven't heard from him since or seen any activity. Sent him more reminder emails last night and had each of my schools resend him another message. If he doesn't reply in the next couple of days I'll have to call him I suppose. It's a little frustrating because he would be one of my better recommenders, as I worked more closely with him during my academic years. If he completely falls through, I'll need to either go to another professor in desperation (and she's one who already said that she would only be able to give a generic LOR), or ask my mentor at work (in a software dev company) to do so, which he'd happily do except him not being an academic would be an issue.

I did my undergrad in CS at the University of Utah, and I'm applying there for grad school to hopefully enter next fall. However, I'm applying as a PhD partially because I've heard from current grad students there that getting master's funding is quite difficult. If you're looking for funding as an MS student, I've heard that Canadian universities are more likely to offer funding for them than US universities.

I've got a rough draft of my SOP for my computer science PhD application. Would anyone be able to PM me to take a look at it? Of course, I'd be willing to give your work a fresh pair of eyes in exchange if you'd like. So far my SOP is still quite long and I haven't worked to edit things down yet -- mainly because I was hoping to give any reviewers here a more complete picture of my background (perhaps too complete! ) so that you can help chop off pieces or tweak areas. My thought is that for someone who doesn't know me personally, that may be more helpful at this point than trying to figure out things about my background to add that I hadn't mentioned. Please let me know via PM if you'd be up for taking a look at my (about 2400-word-so-far) SOP!

My understanding from looking at various websites is that the verbal is less important than quantitative for CS (which is sad for me, because verbal is one of my big strengths). Some admissions pages do mention a minimum cutoff, though. I'm also applying for the fall 2014 semester. I want to really get involved in research, but I don't have real research experience, so I'm still unsure of whether I should be applying for MS or PhD programs, or some sort of weird mix of the two across my choices? GRE: 167 V / 163 Q / 5.5 W GPA: 3.66 2 years experience in industry I'm really wanting to get involved with graphics/visualization/simulation work. My choices so far... Georgia Tech UNC UMich UIUC Wisconsin - Madison Purdue Middle-of-the-road? University of Utah (went here for undergrad) Michigan State? Ohio State NYU Safety (yay in-state tuition...): University of Kansas Kansas State University

Anything in the area of image processing and simulation interests me, like augmented reality or simulating environmental or cultural interactions from a computing background. The open source project I'm working on is trying to be akin to the Civilization games, but with more of an emphasis on simulation than gaming and with more extensible complexity. My fear is that, despite being interested in research, at this point I couldn't get accepted in a PhD program due to the lack of research experience -- hence wanting to get some research experience under my belt with a research-based MS. I do think I've gained a great deal so far from my time in industry, particularly with working on solving real-world problems and finding ways to translate requirements into the actual concerns people are having and getting to the core of a problem to know what people actually want. Working with existing large-scale systems with other people is a definite plus, as opposed to more local/individual homework assignments in class. I'll definitely make sure to express this in my SOP. This was my thinking. I'd love to be wrong on this, but with no real research experience and my work experience being not quite research-y (more combining CRUD Web frameworks rather than the latest greatest algorithms) I suppose I'll stick to the masters programs. I'm glad you mentioned that -- in fact I've been hitting up the MOOCs quite heavily this past year. The classes I've completed (and got Statements of Accomplishment from) are: - Software Engineering for SaaS, Berkeley - Machine Learning, Stanford - Gamification, UPenn - Networked Life, UPenn - Model Thinking, UMich - Functional Programming Principles in Scala, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - Human-Computer Interaction, Stanford - Programming Languages, UWashington - Introduction to Databases, Berkeley Plus a couple that aren't particularly relevant or high-level but seemed interesting at the time: - Securing Digital Democracy, UMich - Introduction to Sustainability, UIUC I admit I'm sort of at a loss about how best to actually leverage this in my application. Would it be beneficial to mention some of the most relevant courses in my SOP, or keep it in the resume/CV? Thanks for the advice. I assume, then, that the levels of schools I'm going for is within a reasonable range for me? Of course, there's no guarantees and I wouldn't want to push anyone into trying to divine the future, but you can probably tell that a big concern for me is whether I'm shooting for the right league. The idea about a personal website is a really good one, and while I don't have one at the moment this makes for a good opportunity for me to get around to setting up a little something that can showcase past and present projects well.

Hi everyone, this is my first post here and I'm looking forward to getting involved in this community here. Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to help me figure some things out about my future and grad school stuff. In short, I'm wanting to pursue a master's degree (and hopefully eventually a PhD) in computer science starting in fall of 2014. I know I've got some setbacks that probably hurt my application, so I'm hoping I can figure out the range of schools I should be shooting for. I graduated with a BS in computer science from the University of Utah in the spring of 2011. Both my general and major GPA were 3.66. I spent my first year after graduation abroad, teaching English as a second language in southern China (having taken some Mandarin classes at the U of U). For the last 12 months I've been working in the Kansas City area as a software developer at a small solutions company, mainly building mobile/web applications and developing middleware server software for telecoms. I feel like I really want to get involved in research in the CS world to be part of something cutting-edge and bringing the future closer. In terms of a specialty, the worlds of graphics/visualization are really fascinating to me, and I want to get involved in research that has to do with visual representations of data and simulations of large systems on a world/universe scale. In my spare time I've been working on teaching myself about OpenGL and three.js, and have been making contributions to an open-source project on GitHub to build a distributed set of planetary simulation server software. Getting involved in academic research seems like a good way to pursue that kind of knowledge-building. I took the GRE a few weeks ago and got the following scores: 163 quantitative, 167 verbal, 5.5 writing. One of the main issues with my application is that I didn't really prepare myself during undergrad to head to grad school. My connections with my old professors could have been better. My first letter-writer is the professor of my 3D computer graphics class, who seemed quite eager to accept my request -- but our connection during college was mainly course-related. My second is with a networking professor with whom I worked for two years as part of an NSF grant to develop programs to promote outreach/recruitment for CS to local high schools. My third may be another professor on that same NSF project, but since we didn't work as closely together I think I may ask the head of the small software development company I work for; it wouldn't be the most academic/research-based recommendation but I think he can give a good perspective of the sort of work I do. In addition, I don't really have research experience as an undergrad, and no publications. I worked on a pretty involved project with the Robotics Club, building the camera software for the university's rover for a JPL-funded Mars rover competition -- though I couldn't honestly call that research. This is the main reason why, even though I want to pursue research and generation of new knowledge in the field, I don't feel confident about applying to PhD programs at the moment since I don't know if I have what it takes yet. I want to get into a master's program to build up that research experience. When thinking of schools to apply to, I've been drawn to those that mention a common pool of applicants for PhD and MS, thinking that would help in my case. Is it a thing that's done, to apply for an MS at some schools, and a PhD at others at the same time? A big issue with me is the matter of cost, and I'm really trying to find schools that don't outright disqualify master's students from funding or assistantships. I want to get involved in research, and from my experiences in teaching (and being a TA for a semester in college) I actually think that being a TA would be good in and of itself. I've some income from my software development job, but above all else I don't want to go into debt or take out loans for grad school. For this reason, I'm putting the few decent Kansas universities on my list if only for the fact that I'd get in-state tuition. I recognize that one difficulty with my application is the fact that I've been out of school for a couple years, which suggests to me that this year is really the best chance I'll get for getting into grad school and continuing my education along the lines I want. I would suspect that having to wait another year wouldn't strengthen my application and would just hurt it by making it longer since my letter-writers at the university had really worked with me. As such, I really feel like I could use some guidance to optimize this process, mainly with making sure that the programs I apply to are useful to me but also that I'm not wasting my time/money on applications that I have no feasible chance of getting into. Here's the list of schools I'm considering at the moment. I think I should apply to about 10 schools in total. Stretch: Berkeley (yeah, unlikely, I know but everyone has to have a dream) Georgia Tech UNC UMich UIUC Wisconsin - Madison Purdue Middle-of-the-road? University of Utah (went here for undergrad) Michigan State? Ohio State NYU Safety: University of Kansas Kansas State University Anyway, I suppose this is all a bit of a mess of a post, but I could use some help in determining, given what I've mentioned about my scores/grades, my recommenders, and the other admitted issues surrounding my application, just where I should be placing my "sensible average" when evaluating what schools I should look at for having a chance at. Is top 20 feasible at all, and if not what should the value of X be for "Top X"? Thanks again!