karl_marx_jr

Take gre subject test mostly cutoff is 720 for cs departments masters degree entrance, it is a good indicator and it is valued by adcoms if you are trying to deal with a bad effect of a low gpa or your from an unknown undergrad school. Best way seems to me is preparing for gre cs (if cs is your target) during this time you can also take some core courses graduate schools mention on their website and expect you to be strong at those courses. Also taking courses about subjects which will be on the exam will help you too and a few A's will lok nice on your transcript.

try to publish your research work in your hand at mid-low tier confs. its better than nothing. there are new ieee acm conferences they are named but not reputed you can distiguish them from "1st 2nd 3th international ieee foo conf on bar" kind of names.

NCSU is good only for networks -others minimal study-. Every one there seems to work on computer networks and cisco has close relations with the department. I would suggest you to go for penn state unless your work is related with CN.

For PhD admits at top schools, gpa and gre are useless, the single most important factor is your research background. So you are in a wrong way by concentrating on low gpa or gre verbal. Why the fuck mit is not interested in gre ? You must also contact with your desired professor for PhD. And he or she will look at your papers first. My advice is publish and publish like crazy. Choose quality over quantity. Find tier 1 and tier 2 conferences in your research area. Make one tier-1 or two tier-2 publications and you are in. You may ask your professor what tier-1 and tier-2 conferences are. Unless you are working in machine learning specialization keep away from journals they take approximately 6 months to publish. Another benefit of these kind of conferences are networking, you will meet with valuable professors and may establish some contacts. Publications are the most important part of your application because for your professor to survive, get tenure positions and maintain them they need publications. In this recession and bad economy it is really difficult to get research grants and it is very competitive. So you are carrying a huge risk since you have no publications in your bag. Try to work with well published professors in your institution.

There is a conference and journal ranking list at google check it out, there are conferences and journals with rank A+, if you could get accepted one publication in one of them you would definitely get a Phd offer from a top school. Mostly A+ venues are attempted by newly graduated Phds or by Phds who are close to graduation and also recommended to academics for getting tenure positions in universities. Actually its very tough to get succeed but instead of doing 5 week publication shots in 1 year period, its better to do one big shot to kill the elephant if dont miss the target, else you are killed by the elephant.

You should definitely apply but your chances seem minimal for a cs phd admit because you dont have formal strong cs background to prove that you would be succesfull in phd. And since phd students are mostly funded by profs you will need to have good qualifications. Also some profs dont want to work with people in thirties. A phd in usa is not a booked seat for an academic position and its very competitive to get one. I would suggest you take GRE CS subject test and get a percentile above 90 and then you will have very good chances at good schools. Unless you have been admitted to a phd program you will be to a MS program and then continue your way with a phd with convincing profs during your MS.

utah is one of the best schools in computer graphics so you should definitely apply there and you have a good chance there in my opinion.

"93% on practice exam" which exam is this 2003 gre test or other one ? For phd what matters most are your recommendation letters attesting your research potential.

Dude, applied with 2.75 from an international instute gre:780 v:530 a:3.5 with one international publication and got reject from northeastern (rank 61) packets reached on november, application under comitee review on 15 jan, got reject on 20th. Looking at their short decision period makes me inclined to (I'm sure) believe that they didnt even read my app because of low gpa. My advice is apply higher (first 50) because NEU kind of crap ones have too many applicants and they even dont read your SOP. Their admissions are only about acads. They only steal your money. My advice is for everybody with low gpa, app higher because everyone think that they must app lower with bad gpa.