thissiteispoison

I emailed a professor I'd been in touch with to ask yesterday because I was getting super anxious, and he emailed back that he was about to email me and that I'm in. My previous professor at my undergrad also told me I'm in by email informally. I'd say it depends on your relationship with the POI though. I know those two professors pretty well and they're both super friendly. I wouldn't ask, say, the professor from MIT who interviewed me last week, since I'd never spoken to him before that.

Bumping this thread! I heard back today and I'm in The people who heard back last week were the first batch, and those were like hands down definite yeses that they didn't even need to review Final decisions were made on Monday There's no automated process to email everyone at once AFAIK, or if there is it hasn't been triggered yet; individual professors have to do it Some individual professor procrastinate Therefore, if you haven't heard yet, DON'T PANIC! You might still be in With that said, who's in? I live here, so I'm willing to show people around the city when people are visiting for visitation days, and/or just hang out if you guys are staying any longer than the actual visitation days. Also, it'd be nice to meet other people, because I'd better like you if I'm stuck with you for about six years

Did everyone who got in interview, or is that professor-dependent like at some other schools? I've heard nothing from them, and I'm just curious whether I should get my hopes up at all before tomorrow

I had an interview, but I haven't heard anything which is probably bad news right now. Is anyone else in PL?

I haven't heard anything yet. Hopefully the emails are coming in waves, and we'll all get ours soon enough . Congrats to those who are in already!

Hah, I wish. I haven't heard anything from them yet, so it's looking pretty bad for me. I'm sure that's a question you can ask them now that you're in, though.

So I have implicit rejections (heard nothing when most acceptances are in) from Berkeley and CMU, but MIT bothered to interview me. Why? I'm starting to feel like I'm not going to get in anywhere.

That doesn't stop me from checking my updates folder in Gmail or my spam folder every ten minutes. Or looking for the blue blinking light on my phone.

Does anyone have a strategy for not checking email every ten minutes? And I mean literally every ten minutes. I'm thinking of trying something like "ten pushups every time you check your email," which would either help me check it less often or make me really, really strong

Probably. I've said this before, but MIT as a whole doesn't interview. However, it seems certain POIs may choose to interview certain candidates at their discretion. I have no idea whether this is factored into the admissions decision. I didn't ask anything about my decision. I do a lot of job interviews and when people ask me if I think they'll get a job I usually have to give some canned response about contacting the recruiter. I didn't want to force that discomfort on a POI. My chat was after the apparent graduate round-up, but the initial email said that decisions had not been made yet. If this helps, why not: POI listed in my application contacted me on Thursday In the email, he listed two very specific questions about my application We agreed on a time (Saturday morning) First question was about a specific project I did at work (I've been in industry for 2 1/2 years since graduating college) He asked a lot of interesting theoretical follow-up questions (some of which were difficult to answer) and dug deep into details He also asked about my research interests, and we chatted a bit about some of what I'd done within those fields He told me about some cool research that's going on that's related to my interests He asked if I had any questions for him After, I realized I'd made a mistake in a follow-up, so I emailed him with what I'd thought about and he responded kindly I can go into more detail if you want but it's going to be really specific to what I did, and probably not helpful to anyone else.

Everyone is in! We're all going to MIT! I'm kind of relieved the Seahawks lost. I was worried if we won they'd use it against me.

If you're Alan Turing, you're in the wrong field!

Oh or by far my personal favorite, from my dad: "That's good, you can specialize and make some extra money." Actually, I'm about to cut my salary into less than a third of what it currently is, and I probably could make a lot more by being a software engineer for the rest of my life. But that's not the point, is it?

"If you get into ${school} will you go there?" I don't know. Thankfully, I have two and a half months to think about that question

Pretty much, to the best of my knowledge. Also, as someone who's been in industry for almost three years now, your Google deadline is probably a lot more flexible than they told you. So your best bet might be contacting Google and saying that you have another offer and need an extra week to decide, or something along those lines. Delay until February 15th so you definitely have your UW decision by then.

UW is pretty much the friendliest university ever, so you have nothing to worry about when it comes to contacting professors. Worst case scenario, they won't answer. With that said, your question might be better suited for admissions, not for a POI. AFAIK, UW accepts you to the program as a whole, not to a particular POI, or even to a particular subject within computer science. Also AFAIK, the only acceptances so far have been departmental fellowships. The rest should be out in the next two weeks. UW doesn't interview (although a few specific professors might), so you're fine. You just didn't receive a departmental fellowship (so if you're in you'll be funded through an RAship or TAship instead). Source: No idea if I'm in yet, but I live in Seattle and have chatted extensively with professors and students in the program.

My professors told me to contact professors when there are exceptional circumstances. For example, I contacted professors at UW because I live here, so it's easy to meet with them and learn about what they do ahead of time. I met with professors at The Technion when I was visiting family in Israel, because obviously I don't go to Israel super often so it was my only real chance to talk to them in person. I didn't contact professors elsewhere. What's useful is to have well-known professors vouch for you, either formally (through letters of recommendation) or informally. It is pretty random at some point, but what can you do about that now?

Good luck guys. Again the fact that you haven't interviewed doesn't mean anything. FWIG only specific professors reach out to interview, and only if they want to for one reason or another.

So this is probably weird, but I was freaking out today over an MIT interview, so I baked a loaf of bread. Pros: Measuring ingredients is really relaxing It's cheaper than buying bread Nothing cures anxiety like a carb binge My anxiety manifests itself in loaves of fresh, warm bread Cons: Can anyone even actually eat this much bread My kitchen is seriously going to be flooded with loaves of bread by April 15th Seriously, does anyone want some free bread

Mine also says my email address, but to be honest I didn't even know I ever had a user ID, and I definitely don't remember it. Whatever, I'm going to go eat my anxiety bread

More likely, they forgot because they're human I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to follow up on emails at work!

How did that go for you, out of curiosity? I just had mine, and I don't think I'd ever been more nervous. I'm most likely in the same boat as you. I was an exceptional student and I have glowing recommendations, but I didn't publish anything as an undergrad. I did research, but it culminated in an honors thesis. So to be honest, I was surprised I even heard anything. I'm confident I would be happy and successful at MIT, but I don't think my history as an undergrad portrays that; I was almost positive they only bothered with published researchers. Of course I am beating myself up for things I could have explained better, but what worries me the most is that the professor mentioned a really awesome project at the end of it all as tangentially related to something I wanted to do for fun. The project is really awesome, which makes me more emotionally invested, which is torturous now that things are out of my hands completely. So I'm going to go make some bread and try to stop thinking about how my data flow analysis should handle concurrent execution for like ten minutes

I was so nervous! It made it really hard to think! Now I keep thinking of things I could have explained much better, or small mistakes I made. I don't know what to do with myself right now.

Yeah, I know what he does, and it's really neat stuff. And there's not much to disagree upon in my field, unless "I think this is cool" and "I don't" is what you mean by disagreement. He has two specific questions, one about some of the work I've done and one about my research interests. The thing about my research interests is that I have a lot of them. I have a tendency to sound like I don't know what I want because of that, or like I haven't thought about it that much, but really, I could name about seven very specific fields within computer science that I would be happy doing research in. It's because for me it's more about the underlying theme: I like mathematics as it applies to computer science. So any subfield with math as its backbone is going to appeal to me.

Some programs don't officially interview, but a specific professor might interview you if he or she has questions. In which case it means nothing that you haven't also received an interview. I wouldn't worry about it too much.