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All the best with your application. Your strong recommendation letters will help you a lot. I would also encourage you to apply to a few schools outside the top 20, say top 50, just because getting into a top 10 or top 20 school is so hard. Top 10 schools admit about 5%-10% of applicants and top 20 schools admit somewhere around 15%, so applying to a couple schools that do good research in your area, in the top 50 range, will greatly improve your chances of getting in.

It's hard to say what your prospects are from this bio because the most important things that admissions committees consider are research experience, your letters of recommendation and then your GPA/GRE. You didn't state that you have research experience, or how strong your letters of recommendation will be, so I don't know your chances at top 20 schools. Research experience is very important for top 10 schools, probably essential. Have you been doing research at IBM labs? If so, that will boost your application a lot. Your GRE total score is a bit low, so it would help if you could boost it to at least 1300. Keep in mind that the verbal score is not so important for CS, but they will look at it since you're an international student (I think). If you don't have research experience and can get that in another year, then doing so will greatly improve your chances at a top 10 and top 20 school.

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I would contact the department to be sure. Perhaps they haven't opened their application yet?

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Be persistent. If you want to do research with this advisor, keep going back to him/her with suggestions and/or questions. I am reminded by the anecdote on page 9 of Charles Lord's paper on graduate school (http://paininchildhe...uments/Lord.pdf) where he describes moving to a new University and being 'pestered' by a new graduate student to do research - at the time he hadn't settled in yet, so he wasn't quite ready for research. Ultimately he was impressed by the student's initiative and passion.

Yeah, I did the GRE last year and there weren't any questions on standard deviation, but it seems to be one of the topics that could be asked. The prep book (Princeton Review) I used had indicated that standard deviation was one of the topics that the GRE covered, but like hahahut said, just the concepts not the actual calculation.

Trust me - its better to be paranoid now than later. I almost had an issue with what you were asking after I submitted an app last year. I had assumed (nonchalantly) that since I am a native English speaker I would have received a TOEFL waiver automatically. After I applied to a particular school they sent me a link to a website that showed the status of my app, and there was a section for the TOEFL waiver and it was empty for me. I nearly panicked but when I sent an email explaining the situation, they granted me a TOEFL waiver. As for the application status on the websites - those are notoriously slow. The experience I had last year was pretty positive as the schools I applied to kept my status up to date when documents arrived, but there were a lot of stories last year of people freaking out because schools were slow to update the application status. I think some people might still be waiting to see if their transcripts arrived.

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Firstly, you need to be honest about what you want to do after your degree. If you're not sure, don't say I want to be a professor, etc, just to put it on your SOP. Secondly, most (hopefully all) admissions committees realize that a lot of people change their long term goals in some way after years of study, so they won't expect you to set out exactly what you're going to be doing with the rest of your life. What you do need yo be able to do is to convince them that you have goals and that you are motivated to accomplish your goals. You should stress your love for research and explain as best as you can, that your love for research may lead you to industry or to academia.

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