phanminh91

Quite a number of replies, here and elsewhere in the forum, second applying to schools that fit. I'm just curious: what if those schools all happen to be top-ranked, e.g. their programs are ranked among the top 20? That possibly diminishes one's chance to get into any graduate school, and nobody wants to graduate and be jobless.

Ah, I think that was to distinguish between applicants from China and those ethnically Chinese but not from China, e.g. Singapore, Malaysia, etc (if I got what you meant correctly). And small-sized sampling isn't always reliable, although the website can be very subjective and tendentious. It's just a piece of advice, and not necessarily restricted to only applicants from China I suppose, it's rather a caveat to give some good thoughts about. Given that only a handful of applicants are admitted, the adcoms might not mind rejecting very strong applicants for not appearing so to them.

I found this particular website useful: http://graddecision.org/Application_RP.html According to this site: I found the website by chance when reading Prof Andrew Ng's facebook. He's a professor of CS at Stanford (he also mentioned having written some pieces of advice on the website), so I seriously doubt if the advice is useful in general; maybe the practice can only be found at some top universities. Still, considering that an area of one department of a university only admits a handful of applicants, I suppose the homepage may become an extra useful source of information when they are to decide between you and another applicant. They will never look at the homepage in the first round of decision, of course.