DJLamar

First off, definitely do not live in the "undergrad part of town" because that can easily suck depending on how close you are to the epicenter of the parties. Last year I lived in a place that was sort of in the undergrad neighborhood in my town and that was usually ok. This year I moved (for some reason) closer to the campus and further into the heart of that neighborhood, and I absolutely hate it. There are parties in nearby houses pretty much every night from Thursday to Sunday, sometimes even on other days. Even when there aren't parties that you can hear, there tend to be drunk idiots walking nearby and screaming randomly between midnight and two in the morning. There have been a couple of times where I've had to listen to frat boys get into intense verbal confrontations with each other at 2 AM. To top it off, there's a band that practices in a shed next to my building. Just practicing all day would be annoying but understandable, but these guys have no concept of consideration for other people and have practiced until 2 in the morning several times (a few times they didn't even start until midnight). Next year I'm moving closer to downtown where real people live (which is also closer to where the really nice stuff in town is anyway). I can't wait. Other than that though, are these really your only options? Is there no option for a long but easily doable walk to campus where you live in a neighborhood that isn't 90% undergrads? That's basically what my apartment next year is. In my town at least, the only place where apartments actually get expensive and small is near the campus i.e. in the undergrad neighborhood. There are studio apartments here that rent for $1400 a month. This is in a college town in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, which outside of this town is a sort of economically depressed area. In the downtown here (which is the most interesting part of town anyway) the same thing would be $600 a month.

AI in general is a field where probability will be waaaay more useful than number theory, as you guessed. Even in most theory research other than cryptography, probability will still be much more useful. But really, probability is easy material to pick up and probably not that exciting when presented as a lecture. I suggest you just take whichever sounds honestly more interesting to you. If you want to do grad school later, you should be doing research in an area that's interesting to you long before you graduate, and you can pick up on the probability stuff as you go or learn the most important stuff over the course of a week on your own. I was required to take a probability course, but actually started doing research in computer vision and machine learning my second or third year of college. I picked up all the probability I needed that way. Later, in the Summer before my last year of undergrad, I just studied a little extra and took and passed an exam in order to bypass taking the probability course at all.

I went to Georgia Tech for my undergrad. First, I think Tech is better in terms of overall reputation and rankings, especially in AI-related fields, though if you want to do NLP Tech didn't seem to have a lot going on there when I left two years ago. What area within AI do you want to study specifically? I know there's especially much going on in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. Second, I had the impression while I was there that it wasn't that hard for master's students to get involved in research. At least, my own undergrad research advisor had about half as many master's students as PhD students in his group. That may or may not be an accurate impression though. Finally, on the issue of crime, Atlanta isn't as safe as some other large cities like San Francisco or New York, and Ann Arbor certainly has a waaaay lower crime rate (it's an affluent college town which usually translates to super safe), but Atlanta's reputation for crime is somewhat overblown these days. 10 or 20 years ago it was probably something of a hellhole with respect to crime, consistently ranking in the top five most dangerous cities in the nation, but the city has made big improvements since then. A lot of those improvements come from replacing housing projects (some of which were in-between two areas you would want to go) with mixed-income housing, various urban renewal projects that revitalized under-utilized parts of town (the less interesting Atlantic Station and the more interesting West Midtown district, another of these is under way at Ponce City Market a couple of miles east of Tech, and the massive Beltline project which as been underway for a while and is a long-term effort in various parts of the city), and an influx of professionals and other affluent people from other parts of the country. According to this document: http://os.cqpress.co...1_hightolow.pdf Atlanta is ranked as the 25th most dangerous city in the U.S., a little safer than Washington, D.C. and a little more dangerous than Philadelphia. Atlanta's rate of improvement in crime rates also far outpaces the national average: http://www.ajc.com/o...e-a-711260.html (FYI this one cites some no longer true comparisons from a previous edition of the previous link). Beyond that, much of the crime in the city is concentrated in neighborhoods that you would never as much as walk near anyway, mostly on the south and west sides of the city. The biggest problem you would be likely to encounter is a non-violent mugging in Home Park, a student-filled, poorly lit neighborhood (with crappy houses anyway) just north of campus which is known is a known hot spot for criminals poaching for students to steal their phone, iPod, etc. Even there, though, the muggings are increasingly rare (I get an email whenever there's a crime on or near campus due to the federal Clery Act -- I get the same emails from Cornell) and almost never violent (I can't remember a violent incident there, these guys always just threaten the students, the students hand over their phone and/or wallet and the guys go away), and as long as you don't live *in* that neighborhood you won't have to worry about it. I suggest living in the area just east of campus if you can, which is safe and has the convenience of walking to campus and lots of stuff plus good access to transit to other parts of town. If you want to do on-campus housing, the grad housing is on 10th street bordering Home Park, but that's not where people ever have problems (the thing that makes Home Park a prime target is the small, not so well-trafficked side roads with crappy lighting which are further north) and you would be perfectly safe there. The grad student housing (and on-campus housing in general) is overpriced for small rooms though, and good off-campus housing is available within about as convenient a walking distance anyway, so I say just go off-campus. In any case, if you're reeeeally paranoid, you could always just live in one of the super-safe northern or eastern suburbs and take public transit to campus.

To put my two cents in, these are the primary concerns you might face with this process and how to make things easier: 1) You want to not get scammed by fake listings or other people that could take your money and run. Going with a sort of housing "company" or big, well-known landlord can give you more assurance about this. Many will have a website or will have listings on Google etc. with reviews, or people in the department you're going to might know them, so you can know ahead of time that they're legitimate. Sublets or dealings with individuals can work out well too though. Just make sure to collect enough little pieces of information about the person that you can verify their identity (especially in the case of sublets) -- enough to be able to track them down if they were to disappear with their money, like a legitimate Facebook link, an academic/professional/personal website, some verification of their workplace, non-edited looking photo of them with their driver's license, or whatever. If you have information like that then it would be foolish for them to disappear beyond that point. A lease or written sublease agreement can help that sense of security too. 2) You want the apartment to be good on the inside after you secure a place and move in. Email or call and ask for photos of the apartment's interior. If the landlord doesn't have any on hand (this happens, even with good landlords offering good apartments), see if you can get someone in your new school's department to go visit for you and take photos (offer them money like someone here did). 3) You want the apartment to be good on the outside as well, i.e. good neighborhood and location. Grad students at your new school can of course be a big help for this. There's also an extremely useful City Guide forum on this site which has Q/A topics for many cities, with big archives of posts. Search for your city and make sure there's not a topic for it already before posting a new one -- even some pretty small towns have lots of info already. For bigger cities, I guess an additional useful resource could actually just be travel guides like wikitravel.org, since they'll probably talk about which places are safe, which are fun, etc. Of course you want a place which is a good location for you (perhaps with respect to your school, perhaps with respect to restaurants and bars) and which is safe. However, don't forget other factors like the character of the neighborhood -- for example, lots of colleges (especially in small college towns) have "undergrad ghettos" which are very close to the campus and sometimes/often very safe as well, but are noisy as hell with rowdy frat boys partying all night Thursday through Sunday. That's all I have to say. Good luck moving. I'm looking for a sublet for the Summer from afar (albeit a place I lived in another Summer which I already know well) with a tough market. It's fairly frustrating...

I have no experience with the area, but The Grad Cafe has a City Guide forum on which there's already a topic for Greensboro with past questions and answers: so that could be useful for you if you didn't already know about it.

Yeah, the one guy that I've ever heard of that has transferred was basically done with his coursework at the original school, but had to start from scratch at the new school.

If you were accepted to other schools' PhD programs already, you should consider contacting them to see if they would let you in next year without reapplying. I've heard of cases where students started at one school, after years ended up frustrated due to advising issues, and were able to start at a different school (years after the application year in which they were accepted).

To everyone in this topic, I thought the conventional wisdom about PhD admissions was that your GPA doesn't matter unless it's abysmal (which a 3.05 certainly is not). GPA is a near useless indicator of how good a researcher someone will be -- perseverance in and attention to coursework can actually be counterproductive with respect to getting research done, and once you get to grad school, the professors will tell you this explicitly. The reason the average GPA for the top 5 or 10 schools is so high is more likely to be a coincidence -- people that get in are people who are good at research, and these are usually the type that work hard enough and are smart enough to easily do well in classes. Your GPA was probably not the factor in your low rate of acceptance -- and I don't mean that as an insult to the rest of your application: it's entirely possible that many of the schools you applied to just had few or no spots in your desired area of research. As for the school, UPenn is pretty good to begin with (the rankings are dumb anyway, and UPenn is high enough and well known enough to be a "good school" as much as any top 10 school). But also, what area do you intend to work in? If you aim to do natural language processing or programming languages research, UPenn goes from being a good school roughly on par with any top 10 school to a great school which would be desired over many of the top 10 schools.

Yeah, it's not hard to do and it's pretty useful. You can even really take things to an extreme and access your computer or a cluster from your phone. That way a night that would otherwise be spent checking and launching jobs at home from your computer can be spent out with your friends, launching jobs from your phone, if need be

If you have something else which is actually portable, why don't you just leave your laptop at home running and set it and your router up so that you can ssh into it and run jobs? That's what I do with my desktop (though that's different because I work at home 95% of the time anyway). It's not hard to set up: 1) Install an ssh server on your computer (OpenSSH for example) 2) Get a free domain name from dyndns.com and install their daemon on the computer (to automatically update the IP of that domain name with whatever your computer's IP address might change to). 3) Set up your computer to manually specify a fixed IP on the local network (instead of having it dynamically assigned by the router) 4) Set up a port forward on your router from SSH and remote desktop ports to that port on the fixed local IP of your computer from step 3. Pretty painless. Of course it helps with responsiveness and reliability if you connect the computer to the router with an ethernet cable instead of wireless when you're away.

As for cars, I'm from near Atlanta and went to Georgia Tech for undergrad, and I go back to visit a couple of times a year. I never have a car when I go back to visit and the friends that I still have there do not exactly have wide open schedules all the time, so I spend a significant amount of time wandering around town on my own by foot and transit. Even though a lot of locals will tell you otherwise, Atlanta is a fine place to live without a car. There are lots of fun, walkable neighborhoods where you could live where you would also have easy transit access to most of the other fun neighborhoods. If you want to check how transit accessible a particular part of town is, you can use this screenshot of my Google map (I tend to collect stars in places I visit or live to keep track of interesting places I want to check out): http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c160/DJLamar/Atlanta.png The only really spiffy places which don't have a star in them are Virginia-Highland (literally just centered around the intersection of Virginia Avenue and North Highland Avenue) and the area around the intersection of Howell Mill and Marietta St. (which has a nearby star anyway). As for places to live, if you're going to Emory and won't own a car, you probably want to live in Midtown (slightly less convenient for Emory unless you're living close to Midtown Station in particular), around Inman Park / Little Five Points, Virginia-Highland / Poncey Highlands (anywhere near N Highland Ave between Inman Park and Virginia Avenue), or Decatur. Georgia Tech and Georgia State are more accessible by train and such, so for those places Midtown (and any place near a train station) is more easily convenient than for Emory and you might add the Old Fourth Ward / Sweet Auburn to the list (a part of town which is fairly recently gentrifying which seems pretty awesome, but where I've never hung out much so I can't tell you much about safety, fun, or convenience from personal experience -- I'm eagerly awaiting my next trip back to explore it). Also, Midtown has a really broad geographic definition that includes some pretty sleepy places with poor transit access, so if you want to live in the fun part of Midtown, consider the parts within 3 blocks of Peachtree Street between North Avenue Station and Arts Center Station, or the little area around Howell Mill and Marietta Street which is super awesome but a relatively difficult jumping off point for public transit to other fun parts of town. For other tips, check Wikitravel's Atlanta article, if you browse it you can get a pretty decent idea of where the bars/restaurants/etc. are.

Well for one thing, overall rankings are quite silly, and area-specific (theory, AI/machine learning, systems, PL, etc.) rankings are a bit more meaningful. Sure, Princeton is ranked higher than Georgia Tech, but as far as I can tell Princeton only has a couple of machine learning people, for example. Georgia Tech is a huge department, one of the particular strengths of which is machine learning (and robotics and computer vision). If you want to do machine learning, then unless Blei and Schapire are fighting over you, you would be shooting yourself in the foot to pick Princeton over GT. In a more extreme example, MIT is MIT, but Penn and Amherst, despite not even being ranked top 10, have great natural language processing faculty and a very big reputation in that area, so if you want to do NLP, it very well might be in your best interest to pick one of them over MIT. For another thing, rankings in general, even area-specific ones, are quite silly. They're only really effective at discerning "pretty good" schools from other schools, in that it is a good sign if a school appears in the top 10 to 20. Research interest match with a single strong professor (who is also available and wants to work with you) in general is more important than a schools overall reputation. Beyond that, the academic and work environment of a school is another factor that might come up more important. MIT is supposed to be a vicious department, and I may have heard the same to a lesser degree about Berkeley. It is supposedly very easy to be unhappy at MIT. Anyway, as for location, I'm an Atlanta fanboy (I'm from the country near there and I went to Georgia Tech for undergrad), but I've lived there and in San Francsico (going back to SF this Summer again), and I would say that Atlanta is about as much fun as San Francisco, just a little harder (but not that much) to get around and a loooooooot cheaper. I just ranted positively about the town in another topic so I'll keep it brief here, but despite what locals and outsiders alike will tell you, you can definitely live in Atlanta without a car and have fun and be in a walkable place. You just have to pick the right neighborhood (there are a number of good ones, one of which is the Midtown area just east of Georgia Tech's campus from where you could walk to campus really easily).

I went to Georgia Tech for my undergraduate work. It didn't seem to me that there was a lack of research opportunities for master's students -- my undergrad research advisor (who did computer vision and some robotics) had about 8 graduate students, 2 or 3 of whom were master's students. It's also a very strong school, especially if you're in AI-related stuff (except natural language processing) or theory (maybe other fields too, those are just the ones where I know it's particularly strong). In those fields, especially in robotics and machine learning, they seem to be hiring quite aggressively for several years now, so you might have an especially good pick of profs to work with. Plus, even though not many people know it well, Atlanta is a really fun city -- I miss it very much. It's dynamic, changing very quickly for the better for the last decade or two, and is even better every time I go back (I'm from the country south of there). Despite what people (including locals) will tell you, you can live there without a car and still have a lot of fun and an easy time getting around to most places as most of the interesting parts are quite walkable. You just have to live in one of the right neighborhoods for it, of which there are several (including the area just east of Georgia Tech, so you could live in a fun part of town and get everywhere else easily and still just walk to school). Cost of living (both rent and the actual prices of goods) for everything is also quite low.

Funny thing is, the third review only occurs if your application is deemed "good enough" by the first two. Last year I only had two reviews (one was E / VG, the other I think was VG / Fair or VG / G or something, for IM / BI respectively). Anyway, I got the award but feel like I may have come close to not getting it, even though my reviews are almost nothing but high praise. The only odd comment was where one reviewer mentioned in BI that I apparently referred to the undergrad I planned to involve in my research as "him," making the reviewer wonder whether or not I've already chosen him or if it's my assumption. I just used the pronoun him because gender neutral language is awkward and clunky >_> I had: IM / BI VG / VG E / VG VG / E

This is my second year and last year I didn't get an honorable mention or anything either. My essays last year were also sloppily prepared and I didn't get any feedback from anyone before submitting. Spend this year coming up with ways to do community outreach of any and all kinds, especially connected to science and your research or field. I mean, I didn't spend a lot of time on those things this past year but my advisor and I came up with some great things to do in preparation for the application. On one hand, you have more expected of you, but on the other hand, they divide the awards evenly among the three groups (senior undergrads, 1st year PhDs, 2nd year PhDs), and you can imagine that the pool of applicants only gets smaller from first year of PhD to second. So as long as you're performing at least as well as some model of a "baseline graduate student" in your area, your chances might actually be better in the second year than in your first. My only publication since last year's application was a single conference paper on which I was only third author after my prof (first author) and another student (admittedly it was a very good conference, and my field values conference papers above all else).