DJLamar

I posted my first acceptance on Facebook and got lots of positive responses and support and congratulations. Since then I got half-accepted to another program (CMU LTI accepted me for only a Masters when I applied for PhD :\) but didn't post anything about that. I figure if I get into Berkeley or MIT, then I'll pretty much definitely post that. If I get into Princeton, Carnegie Mellon (still have one program left to hear from there), or Stanford, then I might post about that. In both of those cases I'm thinking I'll only post the first extra one of each of those two groups. I certainly don't want to post like five times that I got into a badass school (although I definitely want to be able to do that without lying )

Well, I got accepted for a PhD already -- for that I was notified by a professor by email in the middle of last week. I just checked the LOR status page and there is no change or notice there that I've been accepted, so your best bet I imagine is to just wait for an email.

Ha, I like snow, but being from Georgia, most of the time that I've seen it it's gone away in a few days tops. I think there have been only two separate occasions in my life when I was around snow that was on the ground for even as long as two weeks -- one was when I was a kid in 1994 or so when there was actually a snowstorm/blizzard (supposedly; I'm not sure of it's magnitude and how much hype went into the word "blizzard" being thrown around ) of sorts here, and the other was while I was in Munich.

Heh, I'm taking only four classes this semester, plus my senior research project. I am definitely having massive senioritis, especially since three of the four courses are not the same level of rigor and difficulty that I've been used to in most of my classes the past couple of semesters. I've almost only had math classes left (i.e. for a math degree) since the Summer, and this semester three of my four classes are not really proof-based at all (one of them is even sophomore level differential equations). As a result of that and the fact that two of my classes are at 10 AM and 9:30 on M W F and T R respectively, I am skipping a lot... but this is the kind of material that's relatively easy to just glean from the book.

Ha, I had the same problem with the LTI program. I also applied to the machine learning PhD program at CMU though, which is my preferred program of those two, and I haven't heard anything back from that yet. I also have an acceptance from an excellent school already (Cornell), so like you, I'm not nearly as worried as I would otherwise be I'm beginning to think, though, that maybe I should have applied for COS and ML instead of LTI and ML at Carnegie Mellon. Perhaps the ML and LTI programs are somehow more competitive since they are more specialized...

Seems like this topic went completely unnoticed last year... I wonder if there's another. Anyway, I was accepted to Cornell and while it seems like one of my best choices academically (out of the schools I applied to that I actually have more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting into -- at this point I've only heard from one other PhD program and haven't had other PhD acceptances), I am a little bit worried about the size of the city like others have said. I'm actually from a very small town (around 3,000 people) in the South, and grew tired of that pretty quickly during my teenage years. Luckily, Ithaca is of course still much bigger than my hometown and it's a college town (so I assume there is more to do than your average 30,000 person town), but I'm still worried. The only places I've lived since age 18 are Atlanta and Munich (I'm 22 now), and I have been very, very happy living in big cities. One of the things that seems like an upshot to life in Ithaca is the difference between the stipend and the cost of living. I still haven't gotten my official letter in the mail, but www.gradschool.cornell.edu seems to imply that I would get at least $2400 a month (before taxes, after health insurance) for a stipend without a fellowship. At the same time, it seems like I could live in Ithaca, even on campus, for $400 a month or less. I wouldn't have too many other expenses, so it seems like I would be able to live pretty comfortably there... Anyway, I'm mostly just ranting and I don't think I have any real questions at this point. I guess the best thing I have to ask is what the stipend generally is for an RA or TA in an engineering/technical field after taxes are withheld.

Tip for everyone if it has not been said already: avoid apartments in Homepark, especially if you want a quiet place to live. Homepark has been stricken by something of a crime wave recently (and wasn't too safe to begin with), the houses there are (seem to be) fairly run-down, and it is a big undergrad party neighborhood. Not only that, but the apartments tend to be overpriced for what you get (I know people that have paid 500 - 600 dollars a month to live there, whereas I pay $450 to live two miles from campus, next to a giant shopping center and a bus line that goes directly to campus in 5 - 10 minutes).

I applied and haven't heard anything. At the suggestion of my current undergrad research advisor I sent an email to the prof I'm most interested in working with saying I got in at another place and asking if he was taking on new students next year, and if he knew when admissions decisions would be given out. Unfortunately the prof I want is on leave this semester and wasn't able to tell me much of anything :\ ...though he did say that he might take on a couple of new students next semester, even though he doesn't really know right now what his funding situation will be.

I actually would have gotten my acceptance email on my phone right near the start of a bar outing. My phone didn't have any battery power left though so I had turned it off earlier in the day (to prevent that annoying vibrating that it does to tell you that the battery is low, which of course necessarily only uses the remaining power up faster > ). After we had left the place I turned on my phone to see if I had gotten any messages, and I had a (6 page) text message from a couple of hours before -- the email from the professor, which I had set up to be automatically forwarded to my phone via a text message. Of course it's the day that I have to turn my phone off that I get my first notice >_>

Stanford's website and application annoyed me. I had trouble finding a faculty listing by interest and I think at one point I just went through all of their CS faculty and threw out the ones that weren't even in my area :\ Eventually I think I found a listing by interest, though. Then the application itself... they said on all the FAQs and such that you needed to upload unofficial transcripts from each undergrad institute you attended. For CS at least, there was no place in the application for a transcript, so I uploaded only my primary institute's transcript in the "additional documents" section at the end. Now at the same time, this application was due in the middle of final exams for me and I hadn't yet scanned an actual copy of my transcript, so the thing that I uploaded was a 10 page print-out of my web transcript from the registration system, which had tons of extra white space. Half of my application file is going to be that trash paper. A couple of days after submitting, I got a status email or something that provided a separate form for transcripts. They never said anything about that before I submitted

Yup, that's me alright. Now I don't have to worry about ending up staying at Georgia Tech (even though I do love it and the city around it!).

Okay, since I just figured out that your sig gets updated in old posts when you change it, I will go ahead and say explicitly that Cornell was my first acceptance since my sig in my previous post will not continue to indicate this if I get other acceptances

First notice! First acceptance! Guess where! (see sig if you are mystified at this point) This is one of the better places where I applied, too, so I'm pretty excited. P.S. it is okay to post about acceptances (or at least the first one) in this thread, isn't it?

I've decided that MIT is the only website worth checking obsessively since that's the only place where I've heard they change your status to rejected without notifying you at all, ever.

I keep fantasizing about the weather in Berkeley and how it would not get nearly as hot in the Summer as it does here in Atlanta while also probably not even getting as cold during the Winter as it does here. I find that absolutely amazing and beautiful.

I hope no one calls me while I'm at a bar or something O_o If I reject a call and send it to voice mail, the professor will just leave a message saying I'm accepted, right?

I was looking at housing prices in Berkeley, Pittsburgh, and Boston a few weeks ago before the adcoms had even started making any decisions at all. This is nothing, haha.

I would like to point out that affirmative action policies have traditionally discriminated against Asians, more so than against whites. Please, someone try to justify that.

For Berkeley or (to a slightly lesser extent) Stanford, the obvious choice is: It's funny actually that that has become my anthem for high hopes for grad school admissions...

Haha, great . It wouldn't have been a bad idea for me to apply to some stats programs, I guess. Probably (almost certainly) too late now though.

I mean, rankings and names are one thing to consider for the future, so my way of going about it wasn't the worst, and I'm very happy with the vast majority of my list. I just kind of wish I had made a couple of small modifications to the list that I didn't make.

There are a couple of places that I wish I had applied to that I didn't even consider seriously last semester. The two main examples I can think of here are UC San Diego and University of Chicago. UC San Diego was recommended to me by my undergrad research advisor. He said there was a guy there doing some cool stuff in machine learning with applications to audio, which I had mentioned to him as something I was considering exploring in grad school. I had briefly looked over that person's page, and he did seem to have interesting research. However, I figured that as far south as San Diego is, it must be terribly hot there (I'm from the Atlanta area but I've been sick of the heat in the Summers here since I was in my early teens). Because of that alone more or less, I didn't even consider applying there. Well, I checked out San Diego on Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago, and it turns out that San Diego is actually pretty temperate and a lot cooler than Atlanta despite how far south it is... University of Chicago is a place where I knew there was at least one really cool researcher that I liked. I got interested in manifold regularization last semester and thought it was a really cool application of some fairly abstract mathematics to a practical domain (I love crazy math and would really love to find some novel applications of the stuff I've learned in my higher math courses to stuff in machine learning). This guy seems to be the pioneer/king of that kind of stuff (or at the very least, one of his students was). Well now, I look at their faculty page for AI stuff and there are also tons of people there working to apply machine learning to natural language processing -- the other main thing I was interested in doing, which ended up being the main theme of most of my research statements. I never even considered applying there though. This one I think is because my overall approach to finding a school I wanted to go to was rather silly -- I basically made my initial list of schools I might apply to based on which CS grad programs were highest ranked Anyway, if I get accepted to one of my top five or so choices out of the schools I actually applied to, I won't really mind that I didn't apply to these schools. If I have to pick between going to one of my bottom choices or trying to just do a masters first instead, though... I'll be pretty disappointed by the fact that I didn't try those schools. What's worse is there are one or two schools that I applied to that I really have little to no interest in actually going to. *sigh* Anyone else have thoughts like this?

Also I haven't heard anything back yet. I've only gotten your standard application complete emails and the one that Stanford sent out yesterday saying they would make decisions by Feb. 12th.

Machine learning and NLP here. I applied to: Berkeley MIT Carnegie Mellon Princeton Stanford U Washington Cornell Illinois Georgia Tech - my current undergrad institute

Oh also, my classes started on January 11th. I'm on Eastern time and my schedule this semester has a 10 AM class M W F and a 9:30 class T R, so I'm up as soon as or before anyone starts making decisions.