pascal_barbots_wager

Nothing on the award page, no email. Huh.

Eh. My guess is that the people at the NDSEG (and *especially* the people responsible for their social media) don't have much power over the various DoD agencies that make these choices. For all we know the NDSEG is just as exasperated with the DoD, for the same reasons.

Cool. The award page (https://ndseg.asee.org/award) still says "no information about your award status" for me.

It varies. At some schools, and for some internal fellowship, the process is competitive and only one or a few students get the fellowship. These fellowships usually have endowed names ("The Alice Bob Fellowship"), and getting one is a nice honor. At other schools everybody (or close to everybody) gets a fellowship, in which case getting one is nice but doesn't mean much. It's hard to tell which is which from the outside.

If I remember right the NDSEG technically pays a bit more in terms of both tuition and stipend, but you can't defer it, whereas you can defer the NSF GRFP. If your department guarantees a stipend for your first two years but not afterward, it might make more sense to take the GRFP and defer it to make sure your covered for 5 years. This thread has more.

Sounds a lot like "you'll get them when you get them, in the meanwhile we want the maximum flexibility possible". Same for the award portal, they're probably not 100% sure how the IT side of the emails and awards interact, or what the error handling looks like when people look at those things when they're not supposed to, so they're just saying it's useless to be safe.

Same. Maybe they'll come out on Friday.

Is there a status page where we can check that our application hasn't already been rejected for technical reasons (e.g. late rec)? https://ndseg.asee.org/apply/overview/status just takes me to a generic Overview page. I also get the weird "you declined" message without having declined -- I assume it's some meaningless bug...

They did this last year too, and it was just normal maintenance and no results. Probably gonna have to wait until 28/29!

Here's a good Hacker News thread on this topic. Note that the thread is "Tips for Self-Learning Programming", which is slightly different than Self-Learning Computer Science, but it should be useful to you either way.

Yeah, USNWR rankings are not worth very much. They're a few years out of date and the ranking criteria is too coarse anyway. I would not use rankings as much of a deciding factor here (the schools don't differ much by this metric anyway).

I don't know much about BU, but I would suspect that the USNWR rankings are a bit outdated from their last update in 2014. Northeastern has been expanding their CS theory group since then, in particular hiring a couple of good (or at least well-known in their respective fields of differential privacy/learning theory and crypto) faculty in Jonathan Ullman and abhi shelat. They may be hiring more this year, I'm not sure. At any rate, I think this is a good reason to take the USNWR rankings with a grain of salt in this case. I would also caution against placing *too* much emphasis on visits. Advisors are generally good persuaders, so while "clicking" is nice it's hard to assess accurately in the compressed timeframe of a visit. Definitely talk to current students of potential advisors - most departments will have some students-only event where you can, ostensibly, pump students for unbiased info away from their advisors. Attend this if possible!

Well, how good a 3.4 is varies by school. I don't know what it's like at your particular school so I can't say. You might ask your professors or someone else in the department where past applicants from your school have ended up going. That might give you a rough idea of possible paths, although each case is different and yours will be too. But this will at least give you some idea of how graduates from your university are viewed. As far as knowing your chances, you'll probably never "know" them. PhD admissions aren't random, but they aren't really predictable either. Admission usually depends on one or two professors saying "hey, this kid, he/she seems to have something, I want them admitted", and the reason for that can be hard to pin down. Maybe there's significant (and real) overlap in research interests, maybe you have a strong recommendation from someone they trust, maybe you're so clearly brimming with raw talent and creativity that they just have to take you. Ideally you have some combination of all of these things. Everyone's seen people with what look like better applications get rejected and what look like worse applications get accepted. So a good strategy is apply to a few schools you feel are dreamy reaches, a few you feel are not-impossible reaches, a few you feel are matches, and a few you feel are safeties (but which you would ultimately be OK attending). You might also check the application statistics for various programs to help make this decision. Most places publish middle 50% ranges for admitted students for GPA, GRE, TOEFL, etc. Being in or above the ranges is a good sign, and even being below in one or two isn't necessarily killer. But if you're below-average in everything the school should probably go in your "reach" pile.

Ask the two people you mention. Their word isn't gospel, but they are the most familiar with the work you've done and where your interests lie, and as such should have a pretty good idea of where you might go.

I think "intellectual leaps that I usually could not make as easily" falls under the umbrella of mathematical maturity mathcat mentioned. It's a tough thing to quantify, but figuring stuff out is just something you get better at with work over time. As far as math problems to have, that's a good one.