DJLamar

Same here -- rejection. Only one program left to hear from that I still care about, haha.

Yup... I'm also going to stick around in Pittsburgh Saturday and part of Sunday to check out some museums and more of the city. Hmm, I do recall the couple of times that I've been to the CS theory group's lunches and presentations here. I wasn't going for the food though -- I actually was interested in the presentations, even though I still understood very little, haha. They had awesome food though... pizza from the good non-chain place, in lots of different varieties. Was kind of awkward though because it really was a fairly intimate gathering of just grad students and profs from that department >_>

Cornell and CMU I know will put you up in a hotel room that is billed directly to the school (as long as you confirm with them soon enough that you're coming -- make sure you've done this with all your schools). To get to UIUC from Chicago, try bus (Greyhound) or train (Amtrak). I'm pretty sure I've heard that at least one of those two goes there from Chicago. Could be wrong though. Hope to see you at the Cornell and CMU open houses by the way, haha. I'm guessing you'll leave Pittsburgh immediately after (or even before the end of) CMU's open house since you have UIUC's to attend. I'm going to hang around Pittsburgh that Saturday as well as Sunday afternoon and check out the city a little bit

Oh by the way, BKMD, will you be at the open house next week?

Well, I still haven't gotten the official paper letter from the program I was accepted to (at Cornell; I know already that I'm funded, I just don't know how much yet), but the website seems to suggest that the minimum monthly stipend for a funded graduate student is a little over $2400.

There was an acceptance posted today for MIT. A while later someone posted this comment in the results: I don't tend to believe rumors unless they are just too juicy to pass up :-), so after reading the last comment on this forum I decided to double check what's happening over at MIT admissions myself. I called the MIT EECS Admissions Office and talked to a very nice lady there who explained to me that the volume of apps this year is TREMENDOUS, over 2700 applications. I remember always hearing a figure around 1300 while I was at MSRP (MIT Summer Research Program), so it seems they got over 2x the apps this year. She told me that given this number of applicants, yes, some of them have already been accepted and notified, but others are still "in the review stage." This means to me that *not all decisions have been made yet*. She said that more decisions will be made by the end of this week and even next week. So we should check the website even next week, but if we still don't see anything there we may call up the EECS office and ask again what's happening at that time. I wonder if this is really true? It would really be nice if it were... but at the same time I had found that calendar on a public MIT website that had an appointment for graduate admissions final decisions the first Thursday Friday of February or so.

Well, turns out there is no debate here anyway -- I was rejected from this school today These ideas would have been nice 3 - 4 months ago (when writing research statements) or even two or three weeks ago before they made decisions...

Reviewing this guy's page and past publications again, honestly, I would say that it wouldn't even be much of a compromise at all to what I would be doing with theory and algorithms -- it would mostly just be that the work I would do with him would be framed in different contexts and applications. Hmm. This might not even almost be a bad idea, really.

Did anyone else apply to multiple programs at CMU and only hear back from one of them so far? I'm going to go to the LTI open house (I was accepted there for a Masters only) in order to keep my options open, and perhaps if I'm very lucky I can positively influence a decision on my machine learning application since I'm meeting with a bunch of joint LTI / MLD professors when I go there next week...

There is one particular school which I would love to go to due to the researchers there, weather, and other things. However, the two profs that I emphasized in my research statement for that school may not be taking students this year (one definitely isn't due to already having a huge group, and the other probably isn't in my estimation since he has a group almost as big as the other). I'm pretty sure that was pretty damaging to my already fairly slim chances there. However, there is a professor that's new there that barely has any students that I could work with. This professor, I've learned (through completely honest and legitimate means, mind you -- it was listed on a public page on the department's site), is also on the admissions committee this year. In short, I'm pretty sure he really wants students he can work with and he has the power to influence the decisions made by the committee. Now this professor's work is actually really closely related to the research work I've already done as an undergrad, so I have an advantage there too. The problem is, I am hoping to do some fairly different work in grad school. Namely, the work I have done so far is a little too applied for my taste and I want to focus a bit more on the algorithms and theory side of my subfield (as well as applications to an area / set of problems pretty different from what I've already done). If I went to this school, ideally I would at most only be working with this guy on side projects or something here and there, or at best he would be my co-advisor with another prof. Now to make this even more risky, I think the school in question assigns advisors to students upon entry to the program. Now there is, realistically, not much chance of my actually influencing any decisions here. However, my current research advisor has already told me that it's a good idea at this point to contact specific faculty at schools that haven't notified me of anything yet to try to influence their decision (he has told me to notify them of the offer I've already received and to describe the work I want to do and what I have done). I've actually already contacted another prof on the admissions committee at this school as well as yet another prof there (these are the two profs in my SOP), with a not to useful response from the former and no response from the latter. Should I at least try to send this other guy an email? There's a good chance that I'm already waitlisted or rejected on the lists at this school since they already sent some acceptances out last week, and the prof may or may not be able to do anything in either case. In the best case, though, I would get into my dream school.

By the way, out of curiosity: to which program(s) did you apply at Georgia Tech? Which professors are you interested in working with and which did you list in your SOP?

I am not specifically a CS theory person, but since you have that REU you should be in at least decent shape. Even if it were in something completely unrelated, it's still research. Plus CS theory research I think is fairly similar to math research to begin with (I think there is definitely a blurry line between the two fields, especially between CS theory and combinatorics as it seems from attending a good number of CS theory colloquia in the last year or two). Any math research is probably going to not only be a testament to your ability to do research period, but also a testament to having at least some research skills specifically relevant to the field in which you're applying. I am hoping and assuming that one of your LORs is the person that supervised you for that REU. Are you applying to both Masters and PhD programs? Either way, if the one M.S. (right?) program to which you've already been accepted turns out to be your only option and you can afford it, I would say go ahead and do that and make sure you have a strong focus on your research while there. Definitely do a thesis if given the option and try to publish as much as possible in good conferences and journals. That will be your ticket to a PhD program afterwards if you choose to do that. I guess you should also try to work closely with at least two professors while there so that you can get several exceptional letters.

Yeah, Georgia Tech is open on President's Day too. Between Spring break, MLK, Jr. Day, and the fact that it's an engineering school, the school can't afford any more holidays Not to mention the fact that classes Friday got cut off at 2:30 PM because of snow... lol

Like, we can take at least the top ten or so schools in every discipline and get each of them to agree to have someone from their ad com in each discipline come and post here regularly. That way when we get topics like "OMG UC Berkeley sent some acceptances and I didn't hear anything does that mean I'm screwed?" they can reassure us with things like "don't worry, we only already sent acceptances to the top 0.0005% of candidates and we're going to send acceptances to the people that get our next third of our available slots about two weeks from now." That would be really swell.

Well, sucks for me haha. Congratulations on your acceptance though!

For Princeton, did you get a form/batch email or did you get a personal email from a professor?

I'm still waiting for mine. I imagine they probably mailed them all out by Monday or Tuesday at the latest. I'm in Atlanta though so those giant blizzards were right in the middle of the path that my letter would probably follow. I really want to get my official letter to have all the details about things

Haha, I can relate to this with my admission to Cornell. I'm really excited about the school at this point. I'm still trying to make myself more excited about the town it's in though coyabean, if you end up going to Emory, I've been at Georgia Tech in Atlanta for three of the last four years (one of those years was study abroad ) so I can tell you a bit about stuff in the city. I've mostly hung around midtown though more than the area where Emory is, but I suspect I could still be somewhat helpful. Atlanta is a pretty cool city by the way -- I'll miss it!

I have a 760 quantitative GRE score as well and I would be really pissed if I actually did find out that that's what's keeping me out of some of the programs that I applied to -- especially since I'm a math major as well and had a 4.0 in upper level math courses! (though ok, I did have a C in calc III freshman year )

I think grotesqueidols was referring to the fact that I listed both that event and the event for the "admissions committee" meeting the next day.

Despite trying, I couldn't find any similar calendar for Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, or Princeton, haha. Although the thing that I found initially that got me started with intelligent Google searches to try to find things like this was a listing of all of the members on Berkeley's EECS grad admissions committee (this is not hard to find yourself on Google ).

Oh yeah, I had overlooked the fact that you were an archaeologist, haha. Also what is the meaning of this: http://eecscal.mit.edu/Pages/CalendarViews/MonthView.aspx?RoomId=3&Date=2%2f10%2f2010+12%3a00%3a00+AM look at February 4th and 5th... 4th: "Graduate Admissions Final Decision 8:00 AM - 7:00 PM" 5th: "Admissions Committee 8:30 AM - 7:00 PM" O_O

Ah, an hour south on 75, I mean. I've never been to Columbus, I think. After checking a map, I think that's because it's so far southwest of me that I just never passed through or anything. Did you go to Tech or somewhere else for undergrad?

I'm from near Atlanta -- from a small town about an hour's drive south of there. Where are you from in Georgia?

What subfield do you work in? I'll be at Cornell's visit day too -- I am going to do machine learning and natural language processing.