DJLamar

Does anyone know which of the following schools have been closed due to weather? MIT Princeton Carnegie Mellon

Hey, that about the GRE scores is another good point that I had forgotten. Yeah, I call bullshit on this result submission haha. Has to be fake. And J.s., there are three or four acceptances for MIT listed in the results search. The question is whether they're real. Last year the MIT acceptances came out around the 10th - 12th of February, which also contradicts the "late February" message which was supposedly there last year.

That sounds like a very good strategy with the visits. If you get accepted to Berkeley or Stanford, I imagine it might be cheaper to fly from India to San Francisco than it would be to get to New York from there, so maybe that would help. Plus if you get three or four schools to help you out with about $500 each you can probably make the trip at relatively little expense to yourself. I imagine San Francisco to Illinois might be $300 or more, but Illinois to Ithaca would probably be $100 - $200 since they are fairly close (from Atlanta to Ithaca via Newark looks like it's going to cost me $190 round trip, and I'm pretty sure Urbana-Champagne / Chicago are closer to Ithaca than Atlanta ). Good luck planning this either way! I would go ahead and start trying to get the visa (regardless of if you know you'll be able to afford the trip) if it's not terribly expensive, since it will probably take some time.

Yeeeeah ok, from India I think even kayak isn't going to get you a ticket to Ithaca for less than $1000... haha. Like I said maybe I'll see you in the Fall... if you meet a guy from Georgia Tech doing NLP and/or machine learning, mention the name DJLamar

By the way... instead of cracking open another one of my strong beers, I borrowed a nice Bavarian wheat beer from my roommate

Oh, and I sent the two non-responses within the last day or two.

Eh, I think I sent four different emails. Two have yet to receive a response, one responded saying he might take students but is on parental leave this semester and didn't know his funding situation, one responded saying he wasn't taking any students since he already had 13... haha.

Well, after I was admitted to Cornell my undergrad research advisor recommended that I email profs (with whom I had had no prior contact) I liked at the other schools to which I applied, including my acceptance in the email and asking things like if they were taking new students and if they knew when the school would release decisions... so that can't be that bad an idea and I imagine it's a perfectly good idea.

I know right! I'm waiting on MIT too but at least I can be confident that they've gone home by 9 PM or so (or God, I would hope so at least). I finished my beer I could have another but I only have one left and it's quite a bit of alcohol in one since it's so strong (~10% ABV) and still 12 ounces... Listening to Tupac though and that always feels good

And 9 PM here on the east coast. I'm drinking a very rich, hearty, and high gravity chocolate stout in appropriate glassware and still thinking that at any moment I could receive a happy email from a professor at Berkeley offering me admission to their PhD program. I mean, the offer I received already from another school on the east coast was emailed to me around 7:15 PM local time, so I have at least another hour to go for tonight. *sigh* I need to buy cigarettes (I'm not a regular smoker...).

Yeah okay, good point. There was the one person that posted an acceptance with 6 journal publications, 10 conference publications, 4.0 GPA, 800/800/5.0 on the GRE... that seems somewhat hyperbolic -- either that or this person was superhuman (I'm pretty sure there are newly hired professors in this field that don't have that kind of publication record).

Ah, I didn't notice you were international. That's too bad that you can't visit. Keep watch and check sites like kayak.com, maybe if you're lucky you can at least get a flight cheap enough to cover with a little extra money out of pocket. Where are you from?

They started today, it looks like. Judging by last year's results, they accept everyone they want within two or three days of the first notice. Then a week after that they post rejections on the website for everyone else. So what that means for most of us here: get ready to hear a whole lot of nothing and to be gravely worried about it.

What specialization are you doing? I'm primarily in machine learning (and natural language processing probably). Maybe we'll meet during the Cornell visit day, haha.

Some of the stuff here as well as some email contact (which I initiated) that I had with a professor at one of my top choices recently have made me wish that I paid much more attention to current group size when I was looking at faculty web pages to find professors to write about in my research statements. I just realized that one of the profs I put in one statement has over a dozen students already! These "are you taking new students next year" emails would have been much more useful before submitting applications...

I'm waiting on Berkeley still :\ congrats on your apparent acceptance there! That's wonderful.

That seems to make sense to me. I know there are a grand total of four machine learning people there (half of which seem to do bioinformatics, more or less), which is a fairly small amount, I think.

Ok, I had my phone call and it went quite well. It was definitely a lot less stressful than I expected after it actually started, and the professor seemed very friendly. Looking forward to my official paper letter (after an unofficial email and an official email) in the mail and visit day in March.

Sorry, my last post was in response to this:

I got an unofficial email last Wednesday and finally got an official email (with official letter to come soon) today. I applied for AI, specifically machine learning and natural language processing.

Ok... help me come up with questions to ask! Haha. I already want to ask about the process of selecting an advisor and forming a committee since I can't find any information about that on the school's website. Other than that I'm completely blanking out... would it be impolite somehow to ask about what the stipends will be?

He has made no mention of what specifically he wants to discuss. I'm kind of freaked out.

Well, if I got into Berkeley or MIT, I'm pretty sure I would basically have to go to one of those, but if I got into both I would have a hard time deciding between the two. Berkeley has much nicer weather, but is also significantly more expensive to live in and much further away from home (so it would cost more than twice as much to fly home). As far as specific professors for me go at those two schools, the two are basically equally good.

Well, to calculate your chance of getting into at least one school, first we're going to just take the percentages and convert them to range from 0 to 1 (i.e. 3% = 0.03, 20% = 0.2). Now for each school, the chance of the average applicant not getting in is going to be 1 - x where x is the acceptance rate. So to calculate the chance of the average applicant getting in somewhere, we're going to first find the chance of the average applicant not getting in anywhere and subtract that from one. To get the chance of not getting in anywhere, we take the chance of rejection for each school and multiply them all together. So we get: 1 - (1 - 0.03)*(1 - 0.2)*(1 - 0.24)*(1 - 0.16)*(1 - 0.22) = 1 - 0.97*0.8*0.76*0.84*0.78 = 1 - 0.386410752 = 0.613589248 So about a 61.3% chance of getting in somewhere. This is pretty meaningless though since, among other things, the stats of the "average applicant to school x" are probably not constant across different schools.

I would just email the professor and check back with him if you're worried. If he told you he would fund you himself then I think he would be concerned too if the application process weren't going smoothly. I also doubt that he would change his mind after telling you that, especially without notifying you about it. Also... I happen to be living close to GA Tech and I'm graduating in May and leaving town immediately. The lease on my apartment, however, lasts until July 31st. I need to sublet for May through July, so if you're interested in a pretty nice apartment that's pretty close to campus for $450 a month, you could rent my apartment and that would help me out a lot haha. After the Summer sublet you would be able to sign your own one year lease each year, of course. PM me if interested.