BKMD

It'll be a couple days before I submit an official decision but I will most likely choose JHU...

One other thing I should add: In my field at least, the expectations are lower if you're applying for a PhD straight from undergrad, but if you already have a masters, they expect that you have a really strong research record, and preferably publications. It seems like it would be hard to get this out of a 1-year program.

Two things: 1. How much will it cost? It seems like a 1 year program would be significantly cheaper. Also, I'm not sure if they offer funding, but a good way to find out about the funding options is to email the current masters students. Usually the school won't guarantee anything but often it is possible to acquire as assistantship eventually. If you want to start a PhD right after your MS, then it's going to be a long time before you'll have enough of an income to start paying off the debt. It's an important factor, I think. 2. If you want to do a PhD, then I think the research-oriented 2-year program would help your chances a lot, especially from JHU (obviously Oxford has a good reputation as well, but I think Hopkins is often considered "the" program for medical research).

I got a PDF copy of my official acceptance yesterday. Although it was pretty specific to my subfield, it was from the CS adcomm, so I would imagine that all of the letters are going out now. They do have a waitllist, so if you don't hear anything, it's still possible that you could receive an offer in the next few weeks. Good luck to everyone waiting.

I guess my first question would be if you really need an MS. If you look around at decent institutions and look at the starting salaries of their alumni, you will probably find that there is not a huge difference in the salaries of those who have a BS compared to an MS (but there is a big difference with a PhD). On the other hand, if your BS is from a school that is not well known (particularly if it is a foreign institution and you want to work in the US) then an MS from a recognized school would be important. But really make sure you actually need an MS from Stanford before you commit to the potentially massive amount of debt. My impression is that there are opportunities for TA/RA positions as a masters student at these schools, but it is not guaranteed, and you might have to wait (meaning, at the very least you could be paying out of pocket for the first semester or two). If you are seriously considering this option, then email the masters students who work with the same faculty that you would consider working with and ask them about their funding situation. Schools make their money from unfunded masters students. They aren't going to go out of their way to offer you funding unless you're good enough that they think you'll stick around for their PhD program. If you are interested in doing a PhD, then I would definitely take the UCSD offer, assuming you are interested in the school. It's a highly ranked school and it's in California, so I think you will have perfectly adequate job prospects with a degree from there. I would say a PhD from UCSD is worth more than an MS from Stanford. On the other hand, if there isn't research going on at UCSD that you aren't passionate about, but you do want to do a PhD, then perhaps getting an MS and re-applying in a couple years would be a good option. But know that doing an MS at Stanford won't be any means guarantee that you'll get into the PhD program there (I think it often works out that way, but it's not a sure thing).

I would simply ask the coordinator at York if you can have an extension and that you are still waiting to hear from other schools that may take up till April 15. You don't have to word it to suggest that you would prefer the other school; just say you need to wait to make an informed decision. I'm sure they know that some offers may not have been made yet, and it's only a matter of 2 extra weeks, so I don't see why they would decline your request. (In the worst case, they'll say no, and then you can re-think this.) There are a few other threads in this forum about asking for decision extensions.

In general I think CMU is not so well known for EE as it is CS. On the other hand, if you're interested specifically in robotics or human-computer interaction, it has excellent programs. I can't compare to GaTech but CMU also has really awesome facilities.

I received an acceptance over the phone last week for NLP (haven't gotten anything in the mail yet though), but NLP kind of has its own program, so yeah, if you're still waiting to hear something and you're in a different area I wouldn't worry. It would be nice if this school made its decisions earlier - it's already getting pretty close to the April 15 deadline...

My advice would be that yes, you should contact them personally, since they took the time to contact you, and you'll more than likely meet them again in the future. I would also say that it'd be good to email them before you send in an official decision, so that they feel like they have time to attempt to persuade you (if they want), address your concerns, etc. It seems like it would be rude to leave them in the dark about your decision-making and to send in a rejection without warning. But, I'm also trying to figure out how to do this as well. I've made good connections with people at both of my choices and I've told both of them that I'd "probably" choose their school (which was true at the time, because at first I was quite sure I would choose one school, but now I feel like I'll choose the other)... unfortunately this makes it awkward to tell one of them that I might be changing my mind.

The dress depends a lot on your field and the schools. My field is usually very informal and most people showed up in jeans and sneakers (including a lot of professors). The safest thing is to just ask them before you arrive - either the grad coordinator, or a student. One thing that I found to be especially helpful is to ask the students there what other schools they had offers from, and why they ended up choosing this school over the others. If you can find students who had the same offers as you, it's interesting to see why they chose one over the other. This is especially useful because you'll get impressions of the school from the "other" perspective - you're not going to get as honest of feedback when you ask people about their own school. Also, try to get a sense of how students do research there, how often they interact with other students/faculty compared to how often they work independently. And of course it's important to have individual meetings with faculty you're interested in, if that's possible. It will give you a sense of how they think and what they might be like to work with, in addition to their current research interests/directions.

In my experience, the grad students saved receipts to be reimbursed when they took us out. The only thing that was not covered was alcohol, for which you may be on your own.

They are both top schools, so you can't really go wrong with your choice, but having visited both campuses, I'll note that they are definitely different kinds of schools. Stanford is a (fairly) small private school and Berkeley is a large public school. Berkeley is larger, and there are probably more people you could potentially work with, though whether you consider this an advantage or disadvantage is a personal preference. In terms of environment... the Stanford campus is nicer and cleaner, but is pretty much isolated from everything else, and you'd need to take a shuttle to Palo Alto (which isn't designed for pedestrians) to get to most restaurants. The Berkeley campus is a bit more integrated with the town, and has more of an urban feel, and is definitely easier to get by without a car. And as others have mentioned, there are differences in attitudes of the people there... if your school is a bad personality fit, that could be a problem. And someone mentioned Berkeley's budget situation, which could definitely be a concern. I think it's important to visit the schools you're considering, but if you can't, then try reading up on them as much as you can. If there is research being done at one school that you're more interested in, then that's probably what you should go with.

I'll also add that if you decide you won't be going to a school even before they've sent you an offer, you might want to withdraw your application. Why? Because a lot of schools don't do "waitlisting", they simply send one round of offers under the assumption that a certain % will accept. If you get an (official) acceptance into a top choice, and you are certain then that you wouldn't choose a "safety" school, then consider withdrawing your app from consideration. If you wait until they've already sent you an offer, then declining it might not help anyone at that point. Of course, it depends on the program, and the timing doesn't always work out this way, but just throwing that out there since that's what I did.

I don't see why not - they're trying to recruit you, after all; they want you to come, even if you don't think you'll go there. On the other hand, if you've actually *accepted* an offer, then I think it would be very unethical to continue visiting schools.

Ah cool, that's a good idea... I wish I had done that. I'm heading back Saturday afternoon. Well, I'll keep my eyes open for someone from Atlanta.

Yep I'll be there, you? Sure we will, that's part of the charm of being a grad student But yeah, that sounds rough... school is stressful as it is, I wouldn't want to have to worry about financial support as well. It depends on the field though - I'm lucky that there's a lot of money in CS. It's less common to get guaranteed full funding for humanities students, though it does happen.

Sure, I'll go. I'm very happy with my offer from CMU (Language Technologies Institute). I think there are substantial differences between programs. Public schools generally cannot offer as much as private schools, unfortunately. Another important factor that can vary is whether they fund you through the summer or not. Even among CMU CS programs, I think this varies by department. There also seems to be a lot of variance in how long your funding is granted - mine is only guaranteed for a year, with a yearly renewal subject to my progress.

Sounds like you'll be getting a decision soon.

I agree, this is weird. If you're given a great opportunity, you should take it. Also, a number of faculty I've looked at did their PhD at their current institution (or at least nearby institutions, e.g. Stanford/Berkeley), so that doesn't necessarily rule you out.

Yeah, you never know how your decision might affect other applicants, so it's probably best if you notify schools as soon as you've made a decision (of course, if you're not ready to do that yet, then by all means wait, since you don't want to regret it). Personally I withdrew my application from safety schools as soon as I got an official acceptance from a top choice, which hopefully opened a slot for other interested candidates.

Haha yeah, that was enraging...

The email was sent on Feb 5.

Aw shoot... If you're an international student then it's possible that they might be considering you but they didn't want to fly you out, otherwise that's not a good sign. To anyone with a different specialization though, I wouldn't be alarmed if you haven't heard from them, because the recruiting weekend was specifically for NLP people. One other thing: my invitation email ended up in my spam folder for some reason and I didn't catch it til almost a week later. You might want to check your's.

The CMU Open House is the weekend of Feb 26, and they wanted us to book our flights by last week, so I doubt they are sending out more acceptances... but I suppose it's possible that they have an unofficial waitlist, and they might send out offers if people decline them soon. Good luck. I was told that they (LTI at least) were extremely selective this year, which I think is the case of most schools, unfortunately. I still have my fingers crossed about Berkeley, but, I'm pretty sure I've been rejected by this point...

The language processing center has a recruiting weekend March 5. I'm not sure if other fields do the same thing, but I know they don't send out offers until after that, so I wouldn't expect to hear anything until mid-March.