thissiteispoison

There are tennis courts outdoors on the university premise. There is also a tennis club. Anyone can join the club. They probably compete. For sports, Maryland is a great place to go. The only thing they really need that they don't have is an indoor track (unless you count the 1/10th of a mile one in the gym). The gym is beautiful, the auxiliary gym is still pretty sweet, the pool is amazing, and there are tennis courts and fields all over campus. I was an NCAA athlete at Maryland and the facilities were sweet (granted, some of what I had access to was only available to athletes, but most of what I just mentioned is open to all students). DC is expensive, but College Park itself is really cheap. Like you can get a really good $5 meal if you know where to look. Rent is a little overpriced for the area but way better than most major cities. You can definitely get by on $30K/year in College Park; my sister got by on that much in DC, and DC is like twice as expensive as College Park.

The first thing I would do is check with your company on whether or not they'll fund continuing education. If you can get funded for another degree while keeping your job, you might as well get something tangible out of your efforts. Regardless, I'd start online with some of the basic building blocks: A couple of intro college CS classes for majors (at least one in a high-level language and one in a low-level language), a programming languages class that covers several different paradigms of languages, algorithms, and maybe a discrete math class (depends on what you want to do with CS and how solid your math background is). Take a look at the basic prereqs at a lot of the universities and you can find out which courses might be relevant. Later, maybe look into professional masters programs. Like I know UW has one. It's specifically meant for people who are working and want to continue education at the same time. It's scheduled around that sort of lifestyle.

Yeah, my sister isn't a professor, but did get her Ph.D. in bio, and said that the one thing that every single job interviewer asks her from her resume regardless of what she's applying for is about a DoD grant she got. So I will definitely be applying for grants. Do fellowships count similarly? I'm still waiting on two fellowships I've applied for (NSF and NDSEG). I was also told to be upfront with my eventual advisor about wanting to be a professor, which is something I've only recently been able to admit publicly for some reason. So I've been practicing telling people that. It actually feels kind of good. In CS nobody assumes you're going for a professorship even at a top program, because there's so much industrial research going on (and it pays better).

Given your list, you'll be fine with any choice. Take a look at the supplementary materials, figure S10: http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/ content/full/1/1/e1400005/DC1 It gives the schools a prestige score. Possibly more interesting than raw rankings. Figure 1 (flow for the top institutions) is also pretty neat. The nerd in me (all of me I guess) loves this entire paper as depressing as I find the reality it reflects.

CS in particular tries to pride itself in being a meritocracy, and when I started applications everyone and his mom was like "rankings mean nothing, it's all about advisor fit." Rankings, though not precisely the same as prestige, clearly do mean something if you want an academic job. Sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but really, computer science as a field really likes to pretend it's above subjectivity.

If you want an academic job, that is: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 Something to consider while making decisions, unfortunately.

The professor from my UG who helped me through most of the grad school applications essentially told me that I'd be better off given my aspirations to go to a more prestigious school that I was admitted to, citing this study: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 It means a lot that he said this despite being in a position to recruit me. I don't think you get very many people who advocate for you on that level in your life. I am not surprised that prestige apparently matters this much in my field, but I am a little disappointed. It has been really difficult to work my way up since I was a terrible high school student. The data about women in my field is even more disappointing. Honestly, though, it just makes me want to be really awesome at this whole graduate school thing and become a fantastic professor against all odds. I'm not positive yet whether I'll prefer a mostly-research professorship at a prestigious university or a mostly-teaching professorship at a less prestigious university, but I figure given that it's best to open myself up to both.

Is anyone else still waiting? I've seen some rejections but I haven't received mine yet, haha

I somehow haven't gotten rejected yet. knockonwood It'll probably be like Berkeley where they'll give me 24 hours to feel a tiny semblance of hope and then reject me in the second wave

I'm not positive, but I know a lot of schools say that funding isn't guaranteed after x years as some sort of legal protection to themselves, when really at most of the top schools you should be fine for the entirety of your Ph.D.

This is an unfortunate reality of the process. Admissions committees are generally more critical of someone who has been out of undergrad for a few years regardless of what that person has been doing. Which is silly to me, because it's very easy to throw yourself into a Ph.D program after finishing undergrad, but very hard once you've had a few years to think about it; the former might mean you're not sure what to do with yourself, but the latter means you're absolutely committed. But hey, I'm not on an admissions committee

I was just a Ph.D applicant and my status also hasn't changed. It looks like they're rejecting either in batches or slowly. That or we're on a waitlist. No idea.

I had a dream last night that I got into Harvard. That wasn't a fun dream to wake up from.

About 20. And I've already been accepted to the school I care most about (UW). I just keep hoping for some kind of miracle with MIT or something haha

Oh gosh nevermind, somehow last year's thread got bumped? There's a 2015 thread somewhere. God I panicked haha

I also grew up in Providence. My dad does the Providence-to-Boston commute every day. It's awful by car. I wouldn't recommend it. If you're OK with taking the commuter train, it's not quite as bad, plus you can get some work done on the train. But it's still a long commute which is highly correlated with job dissatisfaction. The east side of Providence is really, really nice. I grew up pretty close to the Brown campus, but more toward the track/football stadium. Cute neighborhood, some stuff to do nearby. Probably pretty pricey. But the kind of place where it's great to raise a family. Providence changes a lot depending on where you go. Some places are pretty dangerous and some are, well, the east side. There's a lot in between. As far as OP's mafia concern, the only impact I've noticed is a disproportionately high percentage of Italian politicians and really, really awesome Italian food.

This is really unfortunate and if I'd gotten these emails I'd be heartbroken, but there are posts about getting lawyers. I'm wondering what that would accomplish. Deprive CMU of more funding so that they can accept even fewer students and have fewer resources to refine their admissions process? I hope they issue a formal apology and explanation but suing isn't going to accomplish anything. * As I've still heard absolutely nothing from CMU, I'm totally not impacted by this so it's easy for me to say this kind of stuff

Was there a checkbox for "please consider me for a masters if I don't get in" or did you have to explicitly apply to both masters and Ph.D? I can't remember what I did, but I've heard nothing, so I guess I'm not being considered for masters. Not like I'd want a masters anyways, but I feel like if it were a checkbox I probably would have checked it because why not.

How exactly would I go about doing that?

To be honest I feel the opposite way about this site. UW admitted a batch of people two weeks before I got in, then another batch slowly two weeks later. I was at the end of that second batch. I was panicking the whole week about how I hadn't gotten in because of this site. Then I got in.

Excited to meet all of you. I will at least be there Tuesday. Loser777, hopefully we can get past our Pokemon disagreements. Let me know if you have extra time and want coffee or anything. Since I'm already familiar with Seattle and with the professors at UW, my main goal in this visit is to meet as many potential students as possible and get a feel for what the class might look like.

I started off my SOP with a classic "boy [girl] genius" intro. Probably would have scrapped that and played the adversity angle better (no computer science in my high school) like I did for the NSF. Also maybe would have scrapped a couple schools I applied to that weren't good research fits and gone a little further down the rankings to find a couple more schools that are good research fits. Though I am very happy with one school I've already been admitted to. I also didn't get rejected from any schools at which I knew the professors well before applying, so I would have tried to forge personal connections at more schools. Which is awkward, but I think it's part of the game.

I applied for a Ph.D in PL and my friend who is at CMU said they only had like two spots available this year. I think last year they had none, so two is probably better, but that might be why you're not seeing bulk acceptances. They really can't accept that many people right now in some programs. Not sure about MS though. Since that's not tied to a POI it's probably not the same.

So who will I be seeing in March at the visit?

Also as far as your nationality goes, my first thought was "why would any school do that?" But, um: http://www.umass.edu/gradschool/sites/default/files/iranian_student_admissions_2_2015.pdf I don't think they could make a case for clinical psych being used for nuclear development, but honestly, who knows. I expect this sort of thing to come from The Onion, not a university.