DJLamar

Okay, a bit of a trick for anyone who uses AT&T and is at at least my level of obsession at this point: you can email a message to 10digitphonenumber@txt.att.net to have that message sent as a text to that phone number. So you can set up a filter that, for example, intercepts all incoming messages with *berkeley.edu in the from field and have them sent to you as a text message as soon as you get them. I just set this filter up for 8 of the 9 schools to which I applied (since one of the schools is my undergrad institution, and I get dozens of emails from them every day that I definitely don't want forwarded to my phone). Hope you have fun with the tip! Haha.

Ha, I have a data plan on my (not smart-) phone, and I have the Gmail app on there already so I can just check my email from my phone as soon as I wake up (and at five to fifteen minute inetervals throughout the day when I'm away from a computer). Does anyone know if there's a way to email a certain address to send a text message to someone (on AT&T)? If so then I can imagine creating a nice little filter in Gmail that would notify me by text message whenever I got an email from Berkeley, MIT, etc...

Haha, that would be a hell of a way to go. Unfortunately even moving over there is unrealistic considering I would have to take out enough in loans to start a small business in order to afford rent there until I started making any money :\

No Georgia Tech? Our school is really quite good you know, and we have a sizable number of faculty working in computer vision

I wondered about this too. My research advisor said it wasn't important, and told me not to bother reporting the results unless I got a very high score. I took it before I was told it didn't matter, and got 76th percentile since I hadn't yet finished my theory coursework and since my curriculum was sorely lacking in systems courses (I had one at a pretty basic level, basically nothing about operating systems or networking at all). I didn't report my subject score to most of the places I applied. However, for some reason when I was looking at FAQs etc. I became convinced that Princeton were especially insistent that applicants submit a subject score, so I went ahead and sent it to them. So if I get accepted everywhere but Princeton or rejected everywhere but Princeton (both highly unlikely, or at least the former is definitely unlikely and the latter is hopefully unlikely), maybe we'll have a better idea about the difference it makes

Hmm, go buy some crazy Belgian beer perhaps? Also my plan for what to do (if I ignore my real backup plan of doing a master's at my undergrad institution) is to move to San Francisco and become a House DJ and then I can sometimes go to Berkeley and scowl at the professors that probably rejected me. (I know you said specifically you weren't asking that, but I rather like mine)

Of course they raised the price arbitrarily -- no one has any alternative to paying the $23. If you're applying to a graduate program, you have no choice but to take their test. The GRE is idiotic in my opinion, especially when some of the best programs in some areas openly admit that there's no real use for your scores (for example, University of Illinois and MIT don't require the GRE at all for application to their CS/EECS programs).

I have wondered this as well. I did a year in an exchange program at the Technical University of Munich (my home institution is Georgia Tech) as an undergrad and it was an absolutely amazing experience. I would really love it if I were somehow able to have another long term (i.e. at *least* six months) experience abroad before I get done with my PhD and do a post-doc... Problem is, I'm going to be doing computer science (specifically, machine learning and perhaps natural language processing), and despite the NLP component to what I hope to do, I really think the chances are slim that it would be very *useful* to my research to go abroad. I would love to go back to Europe though (in particular I would like to go a bit further east -- perhaps Poland or the Czech Republic), or to somewhere interesting and metropolitan in Asia such as Singapore or a big city in Japan (in both of those places I have a number of friends that I made on my first study abroad experience ). I'm hoping to snag an internship this Summer either in Munich or somewhere else cool to fill up the Summer between finishing undergrad and starting grad school. That's only four months or so though, and I really feel that staying for a good long time makes a big difference and makes the whole thing much more worthwhile...

For good news: First I'll probably yell it out to all the people around me, perhaps even if I'm in the middle of a lecture... Then I'll call my mom and post a Facebook status (ha!) Then I'll probably email my undergrad research advisor (with whom I'm still working since I'm applying as an undergrad) For bad news: I'll probably just call my parents I guess...